SL 03-02-2012

Time to Wake Up
March 2, 2012
As Broadcast on Bill Bennett’s Morning in America
By Seth Leibsohn

The New York Times headline this morning reads, “For Obama and Netanyahu, Wariness on Iran will Dominate Talks.”  The article goes on to speak of the tensions between the two leaders.  The truth is, there is tension between the two countries, tension between America and Israel.  And this, as the world’s leading terrorist state—Iran—, and a threat to both countries, is becoming ever more dangerous.

It need not have been this way and it should not be this way.  I have always maintained that the modern-day reason Israel and the United States should be as one on foreign and defense policy is based on a simple, three-fold, concept that almost any high school student can understand:  Democracies should support democracies, allies should support allies, and when you have a common enemy you should make a common cause.  There are other reasons for the two countries’ alliances, but the three I just mentioned, it seems to me, are and should be the geopolitical reasons.

We know a few things about Iran and Israel.  The first thing we know is that the two leading terrorist organizations that threaten Israel and maim and kill Israelis by the day are funded by Iran.  The video footage we’ve seen of children dressed as suicide bombers and trained to become suicide bombers—that couldn’t happen without Iran’s support.  That’s not a legal guess, that’s simply a fact.  The second thing we know is Iran does not want Israel to exist.  President Machmoud Achmadinejad as well as successive ayatollahs have said Israel should be wiped off the map.

We also know a few things about Iran and the United States, although it needs to be repeated.  Iran has been at war with the United States for over thirty years.  Iran has been involved in killing our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.  And its terrorist organizations have long-targeted America.  To cite, again, Jeff Jacoby’s rendering:

“We consider [America] to be an enemy because it wants to humiliate our governments, our regimes, and our peoples," railed Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, at an enormous rally in February 2005. …"It is the greatest plunderer of our treasures, our oil, and our resources. . . . Our motto, which we are not afraid to repeat year after year, is: 'Death to America!' "

And from tens of thousands of Hezbollah supporters came the answering cry: "Death to America! Death to America! Death to America! Death to America!"

These are anything but empty threats. Prior to 9/11, Hezbollah was responsible for more American casualties than any other terrorist organization in the world. Among its victims was Army officer William F. Buckley, the CIA station chief in Beirut who was abducted by Hezbollah and who died after 15 months in captivity of torture and illness.

And the young Navy diver Robert Stethem, singled out during the …Hezbollah hijacking of TWA Flight 847 and brutally beaten before being shot to death.

And William Higgins, a colonel in the Marine Corps and commander of the UN peacekeeping mission in Lebanon, who was seized by Hezbollah …tortured, and eventually hanged. As Michelle Malkin noted … the tape of Higgins, bound and gagged and swinging from a rope, was one of the first publicly disseminated jihadi snuff films.

And the 241 Marines murdered by Hezbollah on Oct. 23, 1983, when a suicide bomber drove a truck rigged with 12,000 pounds of TNT into their barracks at the Beirut airport.

And the 19 US servicemen killed in the 1996 bombing of Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia.

For more than two decades, Hezbollah's Shi'ite fanatics, backed by Iran and sheltered by Syria, have made it their business to murder, maim, hijack, and kidnap Americans with the same irrational hostility they harbor for Israel.

There’s a reason the Iranian Parliament opens its sessions with a chant of “Death to America.”  There’s a reason Achmadinejad has said the United States is a “a Satanic power that will, with God's will, be annihilated.”  It’s because Iran’s leaders believe this, they believe in our death.

Now, bear with me a moment.  Can anyone cite to me a memorable thing President Barack Obama has said about Iran and its danger to the United States other than he wants to negotiate with the regime, or pass more sanctions against it?  Can we cite anything like what other presidents have said about our enemies?  Any documentation or detailing of the threat Iran poses to the world and ourselves?  Recall how Ronald Reagan used to do this all the time when dealing with the country that wanted to blow out all the moral lights in his time; how he prepared this country and sent signals to the USSR by calling it an “evil empire” and “the focus of evil in the modern world,” and his repeated condemnations of it.

Now, can we recall things President Barack Obama and his administration have said about Israel?  I can recall that last year President Barack Obama dictated to Israel what its borders should be.  And I can recall three different Obama foreign policy officials publicly rebuking Israel last year, with a US Ambassador stating that Israel is responsible for Muslim anti-Semitism; with Leon Panetta saying Israel needs to get back “to the damned table;”and with    Secretary of State Hillary Clinton going so far as to compare Israel to the segregated Jim Crow South in America.

That is how this administration has treated our ally Israel.  Now, beyond treating Israel that way, what do we think other nations took from those messages about where the administration is and will be when it comes to the Middle East?

I heard another talk show host recently ask a guest if gas prices would go up in America should Israel attack Iran.  The answer is they probably will.  But, if that is in the offing, what has this administration done to lower gas prices, or, equally important, prepare this country for a gas shortage?

The following comes from an analysis on John Boehner’s website:

Just months after President Obama’s Energy Secretary said, “Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe,” the Obama administration begins “scrapping leases for oil-shale development” and cancels 77 leases for oil and gas production in Utah.

In January of 2010, the Obama administration announces new bureaucratic hurdles to American energy production that Secretary Salazar admitted “could add delays to the leasing and drilling process.”

In March of 2010, instead of opening new areas to energy exploration and development, President Obama blocks deep-ocean energy production on 60 percent of America’s Outer Continental Shelf.

In December of 2010, the president re-imposes and expands the moratorium on offshore energy production.

In May of last year, he White House issued a formal statement opposing House-passed Restarting American Offshore Leasing Now Act and Putting the Gulf of Mexico Back to Work Act, legislation designed to jumpstart American energy production, address rising gas prices, and help create new jobs.

In June of last year, the White House opposed the House-passed Jobs & Energy Permitting Act that would unlock an estimated 27 billion barrels of oil and 132 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.

In November of last year, the Obama Administration released a plan for a five-year moratorium on offshore energy production, placing “some of the most promising energy resources in the world off-limits,” according to the House Natural Resources Committee.

And in January of this year, President Obama rejected the bipartisan Keystone XL pipeline and the more than 20,000 jobs that would come with it.

Just to remind, by the way, the average price of the lowest grade gas today is 3.73. In California it’s over four dollars. When president Obama took office the average price was 1.66.

Again, I urge, we should have stickers on our gas covers on our cars with President Obama’s face, saying “Obama gas.”  And we’ll talk about a bumper sticker contest on this as well.

But there’s one other point I want to make about Iran and President Obama.  War may come with the United States.  I should rephrase that:  The United States may, indeed, have to join the war Iran has been waging against us for 33 years.  But it didn’t have to come to this.  In 2009, there was an organic revolution taking place in Iran where leaders and protestors asked, literally, begged: “Where’s Obama?”  “Where is the United States.”  They were imprisoned and killed.  And President Obama?  He said we would not “meddle.”  He didn’t say that about Egypt—he meddled and we got the Muslim Brotherhood instead of the surety of a long-time ally.  And he has meddled in Israel as well.  But with Iran, the message was we would stay “neutral,” a term I place in quotes because neutrality is not what maintains when the choices are the side with the guns or the side with those who merely march in their sneakers.

No.  There is such a thing as a false peace and a false neutrality.  There is also a notion of reckless endangerment.  And we, the United States, especially over the past three years, have been engaging in this far too dangerously—to others, but most importantly, again, to ourselves.