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Obama's Durban gambit


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And we wonder why the US in not mentioned in the end times. Nowhere in Revelations. Being such a large and important country, you think it would be. Please give opinions of the following cut and copied from an online Jewish newpaper:

Obama's Durban gambit

By Caroline B. Glick

Some might argue that no Israeli interest is served by openly condemning the White House. But when the White House is participating in a process that legitimizes and so advances the war against the Jewish state, such condemnation is not only richly deserved but required


http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | While most Americans were busy celebrating Valentine's Day, last Saturday the Obama administration announced that it would be sending a delegation to Geneva to participate in planning the UN's so-called Durban II conference, scheduled to take place in late April. Although largely overlooked in the US, the announcement sent shock-waves through Jerusalem.

The Durban II conference was announced in the summer of 2007. Its stated purpose is to review the implementation of the declaration adopted at the UN's anti-Israel hate fest that took place in Durban, South Africa the week before the September 11, 2001 attacks against America.

At Durban, both the UN-sponsored NGO conclave and the UN's governmental conference passed declarations denouncing Israel as a racist state. The NGO conference called for a coordinated international campaign aimed at delegitimizing Israel and the right of the Jewish people to self-determination, and belittling the Holocaust. The NGO conference also called for curbs on freedom of expression throughout the world in order to prevent critical discussion of Islam. As far as the world's leading NGOs ? including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch ? were concerned, critical discussions of Islam are inherently racist.

In defending US participation in the Durban II planning sessions, Gordon Duguid, the State Department's spokesman argued, "If you are not engaged, you don't have a voice."

He continued, "We wanted to put forward our view and see if there is some way we can make the document [which sets the agenda and dictates the outcome of the Durban II conference] a better document than it appears it is going to be."

While this seems like a noble goal, both the State Department and the Obama White House ought to know that there is absolutely no chance that they can accomplish it. This is the case for two reasons.

First, since the stated purpose of the Durban II conference is to oversee the implementation of the first Durban conference's decisions, and since those decisions include the anti-Israel assertion that Israel is a racist state, it is clear that the Durban II conference is inherently, and necessarily anti-Israel.

The second reason that both the State Department and the White House must realize that they are powerless to affect the conference's agenda is because that agenda was already set in previous planning sessions chaired by the likes of Libya, Cuba, Iran and Pakistan. And that agenda includes multiple assertions of the basic illegitimacy of the Jewish people's right to self-determination. The conference agenda also largely adopted the language of the 2001 NGO conference that called for the criminalization of critical discussion of Islam as a form of hate speech and racism. That is, the 2009 conference's agenda is not only openly anti-Israel, it is also openly pro-tyranny and so, seemingly antithetical to US interests.

Beyond all that, assuming that the Obama administration truly wishes to change the agenda, the fact is that the US is powerless to do so. As was the case in 2001, so too, today, the Islamic bloc, supported by the Third World bloc, has an automatic voting majority. Beyond chipping away at the margins, the US has no ability whatsoever to change the conference's agenda or expected outcome.

Since it came into office a month ago, every single Middle East policy the Obama administration has announced has been antithetical to Israel's national security interests. From President Barack Obama's intense desire to appease Iran's mullahs in open discussions; to his stated commitment to establishing a Palestinian state as quickly as possible despite the Palestinians' open rejection of Israel's right to exist and support for terrorism; to his expressed support for the so-called Saudi peace plan which would require Israel to commit national suicide by contracting to within indefensible borders and accepting millions of hostile, foreign born Arabs as citizens and residents of the rump Jewish state; to his decision to end US sanctions against Syria and return the US ambassador to Damascus; to his plan to withdraw US forces from Iraq and so give Iran an arc of uninterrupted control extending from Iran to Lebanon, every single concrete policy Obama has enunciated harms Israel.

At the same time, none of the policies that Obama has adopted can be construed as directed against Israel. In and of themselves, none can be viewed as expressing specific hostility towards Israel. Rather they are expressions of naivet?, or ignorance, or ? at worst ? deliberate denial of the nature of the problems of the Arab and Islamic world on the part of Obama and his advisors.

The same cannot be said of the administration's decision to send its delegation to the Durban II planning session this past week in Geneva. Unlike every other Obama policy, this policy is a hostile act against Israel. This is true first of all because the decision was announced in the face of repeated Israeli requests that the US join Israel and Canada in boycotting the Durban II conference.

Some could chalk up the US's rejection of Israel's urgent entreaties as an honest difference of opinion. But what lies behind Israel's requests for a US boycott is not a partisan agenda, but a clearheaded acknowledgement that the Durban II conference is inherently devoted to the delegitimization and destruction of the Jewish state. And by joining in the planning sessions, the US has become a full participant in legitimizing and so advancing this overtly anti-Jewish agenda.

On Thursday, Professor Anne Bayefsky, the senior editor of the EyeontheUN website demonstrated that by participating in the planning sessions the US is accepting the conference's anti-Israel agenda. Bayefsky reported that at the planning session in Geneva on Thursday, the Palestinian delegation proposed that a paragraph be added to the conference's agenda. Their draft, "calls for implementation of ?the advisory opinion of the ICJ [international Court of Justice] on the wall, [i.e., Israel's security fence], and the international protection of Palestinian people throughout the occupied Palestinian territory."

The American delegation raised no objection to the Palestinian draft.

Issued in 2004, the ICJ's advisory opinion on Israel's security fence claimed that Israel has no right to self-defense against Palestinian terrorism. At the time, both the US and Israel rejected the ICJ's authority to issue an opinion on the subject.

On Thursday, by not objecting to this Palestinian draft, not only did the US effectively accept the ICJ's authority, for practical purposes it granted the anti-Israel claim that Jews may be murdered with impunity.

This assertion aligns naturally with the language already in the Durban II agenda which calls Israel's Law of Return a racist law. This law, which grants automatic Israeli citizenship to any Jew who wishes to live here, is the embodiment of Jewish peoplehood and the vehicle through which the Jewish people have built our nation-state. In alleging that the Law of Return is racist, the Durban II conference asserts that the Jews are not a people and we have no right to self-determination in our homeland. And Thursday, by participating in the process of demonizing Israel and its people, the US lent its own credibility to this bigoted campaign.

Obama's spokesmen and defenders claim that by participating in the planning sessions in Geneva, the administration is doing nothing more than attempting to prevent the conference from being the anti-Jewish diplomatic pogrom it was in 2001. If they are unsuccessful, they will boycott the conference. No harm done.

But this claim rings hollow.

As Bayefsky and others argued this week, by entering into the Durban preparatory process, the US has done two things. First, it has made it all but impossible for European states like France, England, the Czech Republic and the Netherlands, which were all considering boycotting the conference from doing so. They cannot afford to be seen as more opposed to its anti-Israel and anti-freedom agenda than Israel's closest ally and the world's greatest democracy. So just by participating in the planning sessions the US has legitimized a clearly bigoted, morally illegitimate process, making it impossible for Europe to disengage.

Second, through its behavior at the Geneva planning sessions this week, the US has demonstrated that State Department protestations aside, the administration has no interest in changing the agenda in any serious way. The US delegation's decision to accept the Palestinian draft, as well its silence in the face of Iran's rejection of a clause in the conference declaration that mentioned the Holocaust, show the US did not join the planning session to change the tenor of the conference. The US is participating in the planning sessions because it wishes to participate in the conference.

The Durban II conference, like its predecessor is part and parcel of a campaign to coordinate the diplomatic and legal war against the Jewish state. By walking out of the 2001 Durban conference, and refusing to participate, support or finance any aspect of this UN-sponsored campaign until last Saturday, for seven years the US made clear that it opposed this war and believed its aim of destroying Israel is unacceptable.

By embracing the Durban campaign now, it is possible that the Obama administration will water down some of the most noxious language in conference's draft declaration. But this doesn't balance out the harm US participation will cause to Israel, or to the Jewish people. By participating in the conference, the US today is effectively giving American support to the war against the Jewish state.

The open hostility towards Israel expressed by the Obama administration's decision to participate in the Durban process should be a red flag for both the Israeli government and for Israel's supporters in the US. Both Israel and its Jewish and non-Jewish supporters must openly condemn the administration's move and demand that it reverse its decision immediately.

For the past two years, the American Jewish Committee has been instrumental in convincing the American Jewish community to reject repeated Israeli requests that they call for a US boycott of Durban II. To secure US participation over Israel's objections, the AJC even went so far as to sign a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton asking her not to boycott the conference.

In return for the AJC's labors, its senior operative Felice Gaer is now a member of the US delegation in Geneva. Happily ensconced in the Swiss conference room where the Holocaust is denied, the Jewish people's right to self-determination is reviled, and Israel's right to defend itself is rejected, Gaer now sits silently all the while using the fact of her membership in the US delegation as proof that the Obama administration is serious about protecting Israel at Durban II.

Whatever the AJC may have gained for its support for Durban II, Israel and its supporters have clearly been harmed.

Some might argue that no Israeli interest is served by openly condemning the White House. But when the White House is participating in a process that legitimizes and so advances the war against the Jewish state, such condemnation is not only richly deserved but required. It is the administration, not Israel that threw down the gauntlet. If Israel and its supporters refrain from vigorously criticizing this move, we guarantee its repetition.


Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in Washington and in the media consider "must reading." Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.

Comment by clicking here.

JWR contributor Caroline B. Glick is the senior Middle East Fellow at the Center for Security Policy in Washington, DC and the deputy managing editor of The Jerusalem Post.




One last comment: If we turn our backs on Isreal, God will turn His back on us. Many examples in the bible. Old and New Testament.

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If you study the history of relations between America and Israel it becomes clear that America has never been a true friend of Israel.

When it became an interest to America, America began to give Israel support. However, such support has always come with strings and these strings have bound Israel over time and led to the troubled situation Israel finds herself in now.

Will America ever fully back Israel knowing the reaction from the Arab world who controls so much oil? Is America willing to anger much of the world (which is anti-Israel) in order to fully support Israel?

No, of course not. Add to this the great turning away from God that has occured in America and look around at all the signs of God's hand of judgement upon America.

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If you study the history of relations between America and Israel it becomes clear that America has never been a true friend of Israel.

When it became an interest to America, America began to give Israel support. However, such support has always come with strings and these strings have bound Israel over time and led to the troubled situation Israel finds herself in now.

Will America ever fully back Israel knowing the reaction from the Arab world who controls so much oil? Is America willing to anger much of the world (which is anti-Israel) in order to fully support Israel?

No, of course not. Add to this the great turning away from God that has occured in America and look around at all the signs of God's hand of judgement upon America.


I wouldn't be so sure of that, my friend. America has been a friend to Israel and if it wasn't for God using America, the modern state of Israel would not exist. Correct me if I'm wrong, but there are now FAR more Jews living in the United States than ANY other country in the world; even Israel itself. New York alone has 1.9 million. America has allowed the Jews to PROSPER in this country.

No...America will never "fully back" Israel, especially now, as long as we keep electing ungodly reprobates like OBAMA as our leaders, But God has a remnant who do, and that counts for something.
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A little off topic, but how many of you believe that "Israel", as used in the Bible, means a secular state with boundaries and a government, as opposed to a certain identifiable group of peoples, and/or race, connected not by nationality, but culture, tradition, history and geneaology?

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Both. Isreal means the 12 tribes of Jacob wherever they are' date=' but they were given the land in and around Canaan long ago and they will have it again when they change their ways to God's and accept Jesus.[/quote']

Correct. Any study of the OT will show you that the people and the land were one. The Mosaic Covenant and the land was given to them at the same time. And in case anyone thinks that ended with the fulfillment of the Mosaic Covenant notice that the promise of the land was given to them (via Abraham) BEFORE the law.
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I wouldn't be so sure of that, my friend. America has been a friend to Israel and if it wasn't for God using America, the modern state of Israel would not exist. Correct me if I'm wrong, but there are now FAR more Jews living in the United States than ANY other country in the world; even Israel itself. New York alone has 1.9 million. America has allowed the Jews to PROSPER in this country.

No...America will never "fully back" Israel, especially now, as long as we keep electing ungodly reprobates like OBAMA as our leaders, But God has a remnant who do, and that counts for something.



Ooops... I just saw this.

Well said, heartstrings!

God bless,

Molly
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The USA was put here by God for His chosen people... the Jews. Any learned Gentile knows the JEWS are God's chosen people. We are His adopted kids. :smile

Romans 8:15... For ye have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear; but ye have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Ab'-ba, Father. "Free from Indwelling Sin" KIng James Bible

In His Name ~

Molly

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Actually, were it not for Russia Israel would not exist today. When Israel was rebirthed America refused to give her aid. The Russians had needful military items sent to Israel; many from the communist Chechs. Without this, the Arabs would have crushed Israel at its inception. After this, it was the French who kept Israel alive with military support.

It wasn't until the Cold War became more heated and Russia determined it was in their interests to back the Arabs that America decided it was in her interest to give some support to Israel...with strings attached, and it's always been with strings attached. These strings from America is what has led Israel to be in the horrible state she is in today.

The truth of the matter is that God has protected Israel using a variety of nations that don't really care about Israel at all.

With regards to the Jews in America, they have been very fickle in their own support of Israel. As most know, Jews in America tend to be liberals and they tend to be against the strong, Israel-first leaders that come forth, or try to come forth, in Israel.

Israel only exists because God has ordained it.

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When I speak of the USA... John. I mean in the "End Times." Interesting how Russia will move in for the kill on Israel first, though. Praise God they are sent back to Siberia.

This topic could get involved. :Green

God bless,

Molly

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When I speak of the USA... John. I mean in the "End Times." Interesting how Russia will move in for the kill on Israel first, though. Praise God they are sent back to Siberia.

This topic could get involved. :Green

God bless,

Molly

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On 2/20/2009 at 2:59 PM, elijahruth said:

But when the White House is participating in a process that legitimizes and so advances the war against the Jewish state, such condemnation is not only richly deserved but required

War against many peoples,  wiping out several in the last 200 years, and polluting all the rest!

On 3/18/2009 at 8:10 PM, ltl said:

I would guess that America is more of a stage-setter for the coming Tribulation rather than an actual player in it. These recent world events highlight it all.

God is orchestrating everything ,  and it is happening,  and will happen,  and will come to pass as written in Scripture.

If America is not storing up wrath for itself for what it has immensely polluted, killed and destroyed in the last 150-200 years,   then the sun is an orange.

then 

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On 2/20/2009 at 6:16 PM, John81 said:

If you study the history of relations between America and Israel it becomes clear that America has never been a true friend of Israel.
When it became an interest to America, America began to give Israel support. However, such support has always come with strings and these strings have bound Israel over time and led to the troubled situation Israel finds herself in now.

continued quote:

"Will America ever fully back Israel knowing the reaction from the Arab world who controls so much oil? Is America willing to anger much of the world (which is anti-Israel) in order to fully support Israel?
"No, of course not. Add to this the great turning away from God that has occured in America and look around at all the signs of God's hand of judgement upon America."

============= end quote

What are the conditions God Gives in the well known KJV Scripture starting with "IF My People... " 

and 

do you think there are enough of His People in America to make any difference in God's Judgment of America ? 

Edited by Martyr_4_FutureJoy
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