Love of the Land: Dershowitz Throws Down the Gauntlet to Obama

Dershowitz Throws Down the Gauntlet to Obama

Jonathan Tobin
Contentions/Commentary
23 March '10

Let’s give credit where it’s due. In the past, I’ve written about Alan Dershowitz’s defense of the Obama administration as well as about his recent attack on J Street.

Despite Dershowitz’s outstanding pro-Israel record, I’ve taken him to task for his loyalty to Obama and refusal to call the president out for his decision to downgrade the alliance with Israel. But it looks as if the Harvard Law professor is finally starting to lose patience with the man whose candidacy for the presidency he supported so enthusiastically. In today’s Wall Street Journal (subscription required), Dershowitz stops short of condemning the administration, but he delivered as stark a challenge to the president as one could imagine regarding Iran.

Pulling no punches, Dershowitz instructs Obama that no one remembers that Neville Chamberlain was a successful reformer who not only helped restore Great Britain’s financial stability during the Depression but also passed landmark legislation on unemployment and retirement benefits. Instead, all history remembers is Chamberlain’s “failure to confront Hitler.” It is, he writes pointedly, “Chamberlain’s enduring legacy.” And if Obama does not act to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons, anything he achieves on health care or the economy will count for nothing when compared to the impact of a failure on Iran.

“History will not treat kindly any leader who allows so much power to be accumulated by the world’s first suicide nation,” Dershowitz writes. Like Chamberlain with Hitler, “Mr. Obama will come to symbolize the failure of the West if Iran acquires nuclear weapons on his watch.”

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Love of the Land: Dershowitz Throws Down the Gauntlet to Obama

Love of the Land: Quote of the Day

Quote of the Day

Michael J. Totten
MichaelTotten.com
16 January '10

Appeasement is much harder to accomplish than it seems. It is not just a matter of saying to the stronger side, There you go, have what you want, it’s all yours, just sign on the dotted line. The appeaser much accomplish two crucial tasks.
First, the appeaser must, to the greatest extent possible, disguise the fact that he is appeasing. He must portray himself as a peacemaker, as a man who has prevented or ended a war on decent terms. That is why, for example, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, returning from Munich after handing a chunk of Czechoslovakia to Hitler, said in an address from Downing Street on the evening of September 30, 1938, that he had achieved “peace with honor,” and that, as a thankful result, everyone should “go home and get a nice quiet sleep.” He had not appeased; he had kept the peace. Now go to sleep, go to sleep…

Second, the appeaser much persuade the victim to cooperate. Chamberlain was fortunate in this case, because Edvard Benes, the president of Czechoslovakia, had no visible alternative to surrendering the Sudetenland; his small country could not resist a German blitzkrieg, especially if Britain was on Germany’s side. As a result, Chamberlain was able to present the carve-up of Czechoslovakia as a sort of diplomatic euthanasia that the victim agreed to. He was lucky. If the victim resists, the appeaser is in a bind, because euthanasia turns into murder, and, instead of being a benevolent guide, soothing the victim as it is put to sleep, the appeaser must hold down the screaming victim as the terminal injection is administered. It is a very nasty business.

From Love Thy Neighbor: A Story of War by Peter Maass.

Love of the Land: Quote of the Day

Love of the Land: Beyond Appeasement: The Concession Man

Beyond Appeasement: The Concession Man

Herbert I. London
President, Hudson Institute
16 November 09

When Neville Chamberlain returned from Munich in 1936 he noted that based on his stance of appeasement with Hitler “peace was at hand.” Alas, Chamberlain was duped and, as might have been expected, history has not treated him kindly. But, however false the concessions made by Hitler, Chamberlain believed he had obtained a concession: Restraint on Nazi imperial ambitions.

In 2009 America’s own Chamberlain, President Obama, has adopted a stance beyond appeasement; he engages in preemptive conciliation without any expectation of a quid pro quo. President Obama does not wait to be double-crossed; he is concession man who gives before he is asked and remarkably puts American interests at risk in order to enhance his international standing.

Without securing any benefit from the withdrawal of missile sites and radars in Poland and the Czech Republic, President Obama blithely gave up what had been negotiated and settled with our allies. This move was heralded by the Russians, as might be expected. But Russian leaders immediately noted that they will not use this gesture to put pressure on Iran’s ambition to obtain nuclear weapons. After all, a Russian spokesman noted, “Why should we make a concession when you’ve decided to correct a mistake?”

On September 23, President Obama addressed the United Nations, and in the midst of negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians, he embraced the Palestinian position for a two-state solution based on the 1967 borders, a divided Jerusalem, a cessation of new settlements in the West Bank and a “contiguous” Palestinian state. This was said without the slightest concession from the Palestinian side. There wasn’t any demand that the state of Israel must be recognized. There was not the slightest recognition of defensible borders. There was not a hint that Palestinian violence would be arrested. And most significantly, there did not seem to be the slightest recognition of geographic realities: A contiguous Palestinian state of Gaza and the West Bank means Israel would have to be divided in half.
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Love of the Land: Beyond Appeasement: The Concession Man

Love of the Land: Another Tack: If Ahmadinejad had attended Harvard

Another Tack: If Ahmadinejad had attended Harvard

Sarah Honig

JPost

01 October 09

To avoid being mistaken for a white sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets." - Barack Obama, Dreams of My Father

You can hardly blame Obama. Most folks are prisoners of their upbringing. They cannot escape the mind-set that took shape in their youth. Breaking through the bounds of early instruction/indoctrination requires a plucky character. Even then, intellectual integrity doesn't always overcome the expediency of exploiting superficial truisms and old associations for ulterior motives and political ends.

It's hard to judge precisely into which subcategory Obama fits. Does he simply lack the knack to unfetter himself from what was inculcated into him, or does he by now merely use platitudes and affiliations to further personal vested interests?

But whether it's conformity or cynicism (or a convenient combination of both), the bottom line is that Obama seems to expect all global arena players to abide by Harvard conventions - to broad-mindedly tolerate adversarial viewpoints, to submit a priori that no cause is unavoidably more just than any other, and to effectively prefer ostensible Third-World underdogs with a peeve.

My country, Obama was taught at Harvard, isn't necessarily more right, democracy isn't necessarily democratic or superior, and belligerents can be soothed with sufficient sympathy, flattery and concessions. Obama's tour de force at Cairo University epitomized the ethos of post-hippie-era Harvard.

EVERY BIT as crucially formative was the enlightenment gained by Neville Chamberlain's foreign secretary, Lord Halifax (Edward Frederick Lindley Wood), at aristocratic Christ Church, Oxford. Halifax would go on to become one of the prime architects of appeasement. After hobnobbing with Hitler, Goering and Goebbels in 1937, Halifax noted in his diary that "although there was much in the Nazi system that profoundly offended British opinion, I was not blind to what he [Hitler] had done for Germany, and to the achievement from his point of view of keeping communism out of his country." Hitler's feat involved banning the Communist Party and banishing its leaders and accused members to concentration camps.

Halifax signaled Hitler that German designs on Austria, chunks of Czechoslovakia and Poland weren't altogether illegitimate in British eyes, so long as German territorial expansion was "peaceful." And Halifax, of course, proclaimed unwavering faith in Hitler's professions of peace. Old attitudes die hard. Once reputations are staked on policies, no matter how misconstrued, it's not easy to acknowledge error.

Only after the Axis bully began misbehaving with particular impudence following 1938's Munich pact did Halifax finally figure out that this wasn't quite cricket. But to his credit Halifax did agonize, even if belatedly, and he did draw some extremely cogent conclusions. "I often think how much easier the world would have been to manage," he mused, "if Herr Hitler and Signor Mussolini had been at Oxford."
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Love of the Land: Another Tack: If Ahmadinejad had attended Harvard

Love of the Land: Neville Chamberlain Was A Far-Sighted Hero Compared To This

Neville Chamberlain Was A Far-Sighted Hero Compared To This

Melanie Phillips

The Spectator

15 September 09

Barry Rubin says this is the big one and I agree. Obama’s decision to accept Iran’s, er, offer of talks is a mistake of simply staggering proportions. It was inevitable – and yet even so it is hard to believe that an American President can be quite this reckless.

As we all know, Obama offered Iran a hand of friendship in the hope that this would finally encourage the regime to open up its clenched fist. Months passed; Obama’s hand remained open, the Iranian fist remained clenched and Iran made good use of the precious gift of time Obama had given it to advance its nuclear programme to the point where it is now variously estimated as soon able /already able to manufacture a nuclear weapon.

As time and credibility drained away, the Obama administration announced that if Iran hadn’t moved by late September, the US would finally get tough, which meant some kind of souped-up sanctions regime. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to work out what would happen next. Having contemptuously disdained the idea of talking to the US, a few days ago Iran suddenly said it would indeed talk to the Great Satan – but not about its nuclear programme, only about ending nuclear proliferation (guess which country it has in mind for a cosy chat with Obama?) and getting rid of great power vetoes at the UN.

In other words, it has graciously consented to talk about terms for the surrender of the west. In doing so, it would park the sanctions threat indefinitely and tie the US up in further knots for months, thus ensuring the tranquil completion of its nuclear programme, and make the US look so weak and pathetic that Neville Chamberlain would retrospectively appear heroic and far-sighted by comparison, thus hugely endangering not just America but the world. In the circumstances, only an imbecile, brainwashed ideologue or lunatic would agree to pick up Iran’s gauntlet of contempt.

Obama has agreed.

‘There's language in the letter that simply says the government of Iran is willing to enter into dialogue,’ State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said. ‘We are going to test that proposition, okay? And if Iran is willing to enter into serious negotiations, then they will find a willing participant in the United States and the other [partner] countries. If Iran dissembles in the future, as it has in the past, then we will draw conclusions from that.’

The US will ‘draw conclusions’, eh! Doubtless when Iran tests its nuclear weapon the US will ‘draw conclusions’ from that as well; and when the balance of regional and world power finally tips irrevocably towards Iranian hegemony and the nuclear blackmail of America and the world, not to mention the nuking of Tel Aviv, the US will ‘draw conclusions’ from that too. But it will never act. Instead the US, having dug itself into the ground up to its neck so that it can be stoned, is going to enter into ‘serious negotiations’.

What about?

Rubin observes:

At first, the leaks were that both the United States and the Europeans rejected the letter. Yet within two days this was all reversed and they accepted it. Why would such a thing happen? Unless they received some secret Iranian assurances—which is possible—it means that the State Department mid-level officials scoffed at the letter but as it went up the chain of command, to Obama itself, he chose to accept it. There’s no doubt that this decision was made at the very top and there are also indications that wiser heads who understand the situation better were against it.

For those waiting for the Administration to make some dreadful mistake, they now apparently have their case. One close Washington observer of Iran policy stated in bewilderment, ‘This makes no sense.’ But it can be made sense of in several ways. One is that the Administration leadership has no idea of what it’s dealing with. Another is that it has fallen prey to wishful thinking. Both are true but the real answer might also involve something else: a government desperately seeking to avoid even a lower-level confrontation and passionately desiring to do nothing about the most dangerous issue it and the world faces.

We will draw our own conclusion: it was always going to be like this.

Love of the Land: Neville Chamberlain Was A Far-Sighted Hero Compared To This