Israel is being urged to give up major portions of the West Bank of the Jordan River to the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). That outfit is now known in Western media as the Palestinian Authority (PA), but it comprises the major terrorist group Fatah. That's the Arabic word for conquest. And conquest of all of the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea has been the goalof the PLO since its inception. Its founding charter calls for the destruction of Israel. And its logo shows a map of the region with no Israel indicated.
The goals of Fatah could not be clearer. And yet, successive U.S. administrations have heeded the siren song of peace in our time in a futile attempt to persuade a terrorist group to mend its ways. It's as if our own State Department thinks a tiger can be turned into a tabby cat if only we feed it enough American cream. U.S. taxpayers have been forced to spoon out billions in aid to the PLO since 1989 -- with no discernible move toward freedom or democracy by this rejectionist group. (A "rejectionist" is one who rejects any role in the Mideast for the Jewish state.)
President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry are committed to a so-called "two-state solution" to the Arab-Israeli conflict. (This is a conflict, by the way, that has been raging since at least the 1920s, when Arab riots against Jewish settlers in what was then called the Palestine Mandate, supervised by Great Britain, claimed hundreds of lives.)
At issue today is an emerging Obama-Kerry technical fix that would presumably use drones and electronic sensors to monitor Israel's border security. Thus, this administration will pledge to "have Israel's back."
Other countries have relied on such guarantees in the past. In 1919, President Woodrow Wilson promised French Premier Georges Clemenceau U.S. military intervention if Germany -- defeated in World War I -- ever arose to threaten exhausted France again. The French Guaranty Treaty, signed by Wilson and Britain's Prime Minister David Lloyd George, pledged the Western democracies to defend France if Germany ever violated the 35-mile de-militarized zone in the Rhineland. Wilson cared little or nothing about the French Guaranty Treaty, instead concentrating all his energies on the Versailles Treaty, which established his beloved League of Nations. When Wilson refused any compromise -- even compromises that France and Britain fully backed -- the Senate rejected that treaty. The French Guaranty Treaty was a casualty of the Executive-Legislative clash over the Versailles Treaty.
Seventeen years later, in 1936, Adolf Hitler ordered Nazi troops into the Rhineland, and Britain and France did nothing. Within four short years, Nazi troops were marching down the Champs-Elysées in Paris. France lost her independence trusting the word of a discredited U.S. administration.
Sixty years later, in the 1970s, South Vietnam was pressured by the Nixon administration into signing peace accords in Paris with the Communist regime in North Vietnam. Nixon never abandoned South Vietnam, but when he faced mounting demands for his resignation over the Watergate scandal, he lost any clout he had on Capitol Hill.
Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass) and Rep. Don Fraser (DFL-Minn.) led a successful push in Congress to repudiate Nixon and cut off all aid to South Vietnam. That unfortunate nation soon fell under the tank tracks of a North Vietnamese invasion. Communists laughed at U.S. weakness as they overran Saigon in April 1975. They consigned millions of South Vietnamese to enslavement and thousands to death.
As Moshe Ya'alon, a leading Israeli defense spokesman in Israel's parliament, the Knesset, noted, "[s]ensors and drones are no substitute for the physical presence of Israel Defense Force soldiers. The Jordan Valley is vital to the security of Israel, and we cannot assent to third parties being there in our stead."
Israelis have long memories. Back in 1967, they trusted to U.N. observers to "have their back" -- literally their back door -- with a peacekeeping force in the Sinai desert. Egypt's dictator Gamal Abdel Nasser ordered those peacekeepers out of the Sinai and proceeded to blockade Israel's only port on the critical Gulf of Aqaba. That act of war precipitated the Six-Day War of June 1967.
Israel has learned that when the fate of the Jewish people is at stake -- as it is now, with Iran racing toward nuclear weapons -- the Israelis cannot "outsource" their vital security. The U.S. should not be trying to force Israel to make dangerous concessions to the PLO -- or any others among their homicidal neighbors.
The growing problems in the Chinese banking system could spill over into a wider financial crisis, one of the most respected analysts of China’s lenders has warned.
Charlene Chu, a former senior analyst at Fitch in Beijing and now the head of Asian research at Autonomous Research, said the rapid expansion of foreign-currency borrowing meant a crisis in China’s financial system was becoming a bigger risk for international banks.
“One of the reasons why the situation in China has been so stable up to this point is that, unlike many emerging markets, there is very, very little reliance on foreign funding. As that changes, it obviously increases their vulnerability to swings in foreign investor appetite,” said Ms Chu in an interview with The Telegraph.
Ms Chu has been warning since 2009 about the growth of a shadow banking system in China that has helped fuel the credit expansion seen in the country in the wake of the Western financial crisis.
However, fears are growing that the build-up of foreign borrowing by the Chinese, particularly in US dollars, is creating an even greater build-up of risk than that seen before the crisis of 2008.
Figures published by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) in October showed foreign currency loans booked in China, as well as cross-border borrowing by Chinese companies, had reached $880bn (£535bn) as of March 2013, from $270bn in 2009.
Analysts say this figure is now likely to exceed $1 trillion and is continuing to grow, raising the prospect of the potentially dangerous vulnerability of the Chinese financial system to a rising dollar.
George Magnus, senior independent economist at UBS, said the Chinese banking system resembled that of Japan during the 1980s in the years leading up to the country’s financial crash
US hostility against Israel is now implemented two-folds on the ground:
1. The massive and rapidly growing presence and activity of Al Qaeda in Sinai
[Links: Sinai_insurgency , Ansar_Bait_al-Maqdis ],
aimed against both Egypt [Link: Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis: Egypt's own al-Qaeda?]
and against Israel [Link: Obama brother tied to Hamas-funding accounts].
[Links: Sinai_insurgency , Ansar_Bait_al-Maqdis ],
aimed against both Egypt [Link: Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis: Egypt's own al-Qaeda?]
and against Israel [Link: Obama brother tied to Hamas-funding accounts].
2. The pretense the PLO was more than a backyard of the Israeli currency block,
and rather a “state under occupation”, is nothing more than an excuse to arm
the PLO to its teeth in order to complete the encirclement of war on Israel.
and rather a “state under occupation”, is nothing more than an excuse to arm
the PLO to its teeth in order to complete the encirclement of war on Israel.
The build-up of tremendous guerrilla and artillery deployments around Israel has been paid by means of large-scale narcotics farming and smuggling, in both the Sinai which geographically and demographically resembles Afghanistan and in Lebanon.Lebanon is plagued with narcotics too – supporting Assad’s regime since his father invaded Lebanon with 5 brigades in 1976, aka ‘the Lebanese civil war’ and has never pulled-out entirely and rather letting it deteriorate ever more ever since.
From the Sinai the guerrilla targets militarily, logistically, organizationally, financially and politically the populations and the regimes of both Egypt [Link: Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis: Egypt's own al-Qaeda? ] and Israel.
Israel is targeted via the Hamas in Gaza which borders the Sinai, and by the many Bedouins in the Negev (southern Israel), who extort ‘protection’ from all Jews there, in order to keep the Egyptian intelligence on top anyhow.The PLO has been a Laundry, at least since the mid-1970s, too.
The artillery ring building up around Israel we have described already on various occasions [Link: The Artillery Ring], and it has been recently back to its attrition war against Israel on the Gazan front, leading to some Israeli responses.
The warheads of the hundreds of thousands of Artillery Rockets aimed at Israel from Lebanon account for Kilo-Tonnes of ammunition, a magnitude which belongs at a strategic scale, rather not at a ‘local-resistance’ level. The rising tensions in the region amid the current Munich convention on ME affairs, lead to the following statement, [Link: IAF chief: Israel will destroy Hezbollah bases in Lebanon, even ones in residential areas]. This Lebanese powder-keg is a superb detonator to a ‘perfect-storm’ around the middle-east, which may lead to an open military conflict between the US and Russia, which may engulf many countries, not unlike the shadow-wars they hold along the stretch from Africa to Ukraine.
Now the US has climb down from its threats [Link], having been called a bluff by Israel [Link: Not an inch of the West Bank till Jewish state recognized], following a recent open admission by the PLO General [Link: Tirawi: No Palestinian State in 20 Years; We Should Return to Resistance, Including Armed Struggle ]. This mode of surreal US threats is similar to what has been happening between the US and Syria since last summer. All this may easily change by means of igniting the entire guerilla potential around Israel and Syria.
The rational behind the US policy is clear: removing the potential competitors from the Middle-east, be it Russia and be it Israel. These two are essentially independent from US technology and are thus impossible to puppeteer.
The ensuing American modus operandi is thus:
1. Create a fire-storm of artillery backed guerrilla around Israel.
Israel would then experience a double whammy
when its monstrous real-estate bubble collapses,
leaving its surreal social obligations unplayable,
with about a 3rd its population and a majority of its children belonging
to the ancient cultures of Ultra-Orthodox Jews and Arabs.
with about a 3rd its population and a majority of its children belonging
to the ancient cultures of Ultra-Orthodox Jews and Arabs.
2. When Israel is chocked it would ask the US to invade its territory.
3. Continuing the Israeli war against its immediate enemies, the US shall overtake
the entire stretch of natural gas along the eastern coast of the Mediterranean,
while positioning its troops vs. the Russian ones in Syria:
the entire stretch of natural gas along the eastern coast of the Mediterranean,
while positioning its troops vs. the Russian ones in Syria:
4. Defeating the Russians of Syria shall bring switch Iran
from the Russian sphere of influence to the American one.
from the Russian sphere of influence to the American one.
In a month’s time the weather shall clear around the Persian Gulf, allowing for the US to implement aerial superiority over the entire middle-east, thus using its long range PGM [Link] in support of its reordering of the middle-east. In the mean time one could expect an exponentially rising curve of weirdness shrouding US policies.
