1. Jerusalem Post（http://www.jpost.com）
Ted Cruz: A fresh approach to American foreign policy – and US-Israel relations
US Senator and presidential contender issues scathing rebuke of Obama administration's handling of the Mideast conflict.
by Caroline B.Glick
23 October 2015
US Senator Ted Cruz, the conservative Republican firebrand from Texas, is running for president. Up until a few weeks ago, his candidacy was met with indifference as the media and political operatives all dismissed the viability of his candidacy. But that is beginning to change. The voices arguing that Cruz, the favorite of Tea Party fiscal conservatives and Evangelical Christians may have what it takes to win the Republican nomination have multiplied.
Since arriving in Washington four years ago, Cruz has arguably been Israel’s most avid defender in the Senate. During Operation Protective Edge in July 2014, Cruz used his authority as a member of the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee to force the Obama administration to end the Federal Aviation Commission’s ban on US flights to Ben-Gurion Airport. Cruz announced at the time that he would put a hold on all State Department appointments until the administration justified the flight ban.
Rather than defend its position, the administration restored flights to Israel after 36 hours.
Last summer Cruz led the national opposition to US President Barack Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran. He brought thousands of activists to the Capitol to participate in a rally he organized calling for Congress to vote down the deal. Rather than use the rally as a means to promote himself, Cruz invited Republican front-runner real estate developer Donald Trump to join him at the rally. Trump’s participation ensured that the event received wide coverage from the national media.
I interviewed Cruz by telephone from the campaign trail earlier this week about his views on the purpose of American foreign policy, US-Israel relations, the Iran nuclear deal and the Palestinian conflict with Israel.
The transcript of our conversation follows.
Sen. Cruz, you have managed to anger the two foreign policy wings of your party – the neoconservatives and the isolationists – with your foreign policy positions. How would you describe the rationale behind your foreign policy positions?
Cruz: I believe American foreign policy should be driven by the vital national security interests of our nation. The most central failing of the Obama-Clinton foreign policy is it fails to look to America’s national security interests. And as a result, we have undermined our friendships and alliances across the globe, and we have allowed our enemies to grow stronger in the face of weakness and appeasement.
How does the US alliance with Israel align with that view? A lot of Americans argue that by supporting Israel the US has diminished its capacity to form alliances with the Arab world.
Nobody who understands the reality of foreign policy believes that. That is the view of the Obama administration and the far Left. I think America’s alliance with Israel is overwhelmingly in our national security interest. Israel shares the same democratic values. It has been a tremendously important ally to America in a very troubled region of the world. The military assistance that America provides Israel yields enormous national security benefits to America.
There are some politicians who characterize the United States military aid to Israel as somehow a form of assistance rather than a mutually beneficial military alliance.
I think that stems from a misunderstanding of the fundamental dynamics.
[This week Obama instructed federal agencies to begin suspending economic sanctions on Iran, in conformance with the nuclear deal he concluded with the regime last summer. Cruz argues that the Republicans in Congress have the constitutional authority to prevent Obama from suspending sanctions. He expresses deep frustration with the Republican congressional leadership’s refusal to do so.]
Over a month ago I wrote a detailed letter to [Senate] Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and [House] Speaker John Boehner laying out a specific course of attack to stop this catastrophic Iranian nuclear deal. The first step, I believe, is that the majority leader and the speaker of the House should jointly conclude that Obama has not submitted the entire deal to Congress as required by the Congressional Review Act, which explicitly defines the deal to include any and all side agreements.
The side agreements with the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency] governing the incredibly weak inspection of the regime were not handed over to Congress.
So under the terms of federal law, the deal has not yet been given to Congress, which means the clock for the congressional review has not started. The reason that is important is because under the terms of the Congressional Review Act, it is illegal for the administration to lift the Iran sanctions until the expiration of the congressional review clock. If the clock has not started, then the sanctions cannot be lifted consistent with law.
Now unfortunately we know what the next step will be to that. After six-and-ahalf years we have seen that with President Obama we have a president who has repeatedly ignored and defied federal law.
So we can anticipate that he would do the same here and say that it does not concern him; he intends to lift sanctions anyway.
At that point, what I recommended is that congressional leadership make abundantly clear to each of the banks that is in possession of the frozen billions of dollars that whether or not Obama chooses to disregard or ignore federal law does not exonerate those banks from the obligation to follow binding federal statutes.
And if those banks, contrary to federal law, release billions of dollars to Ayatollah Khamenei, then those banks will face potentially billions of dollars in civil liabilities and even possibly criminal prosecution.
But senator, they didn’t do any of those things.
Caroline, you’re exactly right that congressional leadership refused to do any of this. Likewise, we just had a battle over the continuing resolution [which funds the government without an approved budget]. I urged Congress to fund the entire federal government but deny any federal funds to implement this catastrophic deal. Again Republican leadership refused to do that. So long as Republican leadership is unwilling to use the constitutional authority given to Congress, the Obama administration will move forward with this catastrophic deal.
I will continue to fight on every front to stop this deal. I believe it is the single greatest national security threat facing America – the threat of a nuclear Iran.
And I also agree with Prime Minister [Benjamin] Netanyahu that a nuclear Iran is an existential threat to the nation of Israel. The challenge right now is Republican congressional leadership has been unwilling to use the constitutional authority we have to stop this deal.
If that does not change, then Congress will acquiesce and this deal will go forward for the next 15 months.
This means nothing is more important to stopping a nuclear Iran than the next presidential election in America.
And indeed I believe this issue is becoming the single most important issue in the presidential election. I have pledged that if I am elected president, to rip to shreds this Iranian nuclear deal on my very first day in office and to make abundantly clear that under no circumstances will the nation of Iran, led by a theocratic ayatollah who chants Death to America, be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons.
On the other hand, if Hillary Clinton is elected president, we know to a virtual metaphysical certainty that Iran will acquire nuclear weapons. And if Iran acquires nuclear weapons, the odds are unacceptable that it will use those weapons, either against Israel or against America.
Over the past 15 years, through its sponsorship of Hamas and Islamic Jihad and occasional support for Fatah, Iran has become a key factor in the Palestinian war against Israel. The nuclear deal, which guarantees Iran will receive hundreds of billions of dollars in the coming years, ensures that Tehran will massively increase its funding for Palestinian terrorism. What we’re now experiencing in Israel may in part be a consequence of the nuclear pact.
How would you characterize the Obama administration’s stewardship of US relations with the Palestinians?
This past this week I publicly called for John Kerry’s resignation as secretary of state. This is the second time I’ve done so. A number of months ago I called for Kerry’s resignation when he wrongfully suggested that Israel could become an apartheid state, which is slander. It is one often repeated by the terrorists, and it should not be coming out of the mouth of a United States secretary of state.
This past week John Kerry and the State Department accused the nation of Israel of terrorism. That is a blatant lie. There is a qualitative difference between antics of Palestinian terrorists murdering innocent women and children in response to the relentless incitement from Hamas, from the PA.
There’s a qualitative difference between that and the IDF defending the safety and security of the nation of Israel.
And John Kerry’s suggestion that they are morally equivalent is wrong, harmful and deeply offensive.
If you are elected president in 2016, what would your relationship be with the PA?
I believe that nobody wants to see peace more than the Israeli people. The barrier to peace is not the government of Israel. The barrier to peace is Palestinians who refuse to renounce terrorism and refuse to even acknowledge Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state.
As it regards to US policy, I think for far too long, American presidents have attempted to dictate the terms of a peace settlement. In my view, America has no appropriate role dictating the terms of a peace settlement.
If Israel chooses to negotiate and reach a settlement with the Palestinian Authority, that is Israel’s right as a sovereign state, and America can help provide a fair forum for negotiations.
But it is not the role of the American government to attempt to lecture the Israeli people or dictate terms of peace.
No one has a greater incentive to seek peace than the people of Israel, who have lived with the daily threat of rocket attacks or knifings or terrorist bombs.
Do you think a Palestinian state west of the Jordan River is a US interest?
I think that is a question to be decided by the nation of Israel and the Palestinian people.
You don’t think it’s a question for America?
I do not believe the United States should try to dictate the terms of peace. We have seen now for two decades American presidents trying to dictate the terms of peace. And it hasn’t worked.
The Palestinians have turned down every reasonable offer of peace. And I believe America should stand unshakably alongside the nation of Israel. If I am elected president, that is exactly what we will do.
Right now the PA is spending around $150 million a year to pay salaries to convicted terrorists sitting in Israeli prisons. The US gives the PA about $550m. annually. Do you think the US should reconsider its commitment to funding the PA?
Of course we should. The PA has formed a unity government with Hamas. The idea that American taxpayer dollars are going to a government that is in unity with terrorists makes no sense whatsoever. The idea that American taxpayer dollars are going to the PA, which routinely engages in incitement, which celebrates the terrorists who murder women and children, makes no sense whatsoever. We should not be funding people who want to kill us. We should not be funding terrorists.
This goes back to what I mentioned before about the central failing of the Obama-Clinton foreign policy – that it fails to focus on the vital national security interests of America. Funding terrorists is directly contrary to our national security interests and we should not be doing so.
The prevailing wisdom is that building in Israeli communities beyond the 1949 armistice lines causes Palestinian terrorism. Do you accept that?
That is yet one more area in which the Obama-Clinton-Kerry foreign policy is deeply misguided. The question of settlements is a question for Israel as a sovereign nation to decide. I don’t believe an American president should be dictating to the nation of Israel where Israelis can choose to live. And the fact that Israelis choose to live in Judea and Samaria is not justification for terrorism or murder. And it is yet another example of the Obama administration’s repeated false moral equivalency to suggest that it is.
That isn’t just Obama’s position. In the road map peace plan, the Bush administration also called for Israel to revoke Jewish property rights beyond the armistice lines, saying that doing so promotes peace. Do you think that makes sense?
I do not. As I said, my views are markedly different from the Obama administration but also from the Bush administration.
I do not believe the American government should be dictating terms of peace or settlement policy to the nation of Israel. Israel is a sovereign nation.
Israel is our ally. We should stand with Israel. We should not presume to dictate matters of internal governance for the nation of Israel. If I am elected president, we will not do so.
Under the Obama administration, American power in the region has been massively diminished. The power vacuum that followed is now being filled by Russia, Iran, Turkey, Islamic State and others. How would you reassert American leadership, if you become the next president?
I believe one of the most, if not the most important issue in the 2016 presidential elections will be restoring American leadership in the world. That consists of number one, standing by our friends and allies. And number two, standing up to our enemies. In both regards, the Obama-Clinton foreign policy has been deeply misguided. We have proven over and over again to be an unreliable friend to our allies under President Obama. Indeed, as I travel abroad and meet with heads of states, foreign ministers and defense ministers of allies across the world, the message is consistently the same, which is: “Where is America? We cannot do this without America leading in the world.”
And you are right, the consequence of America’s withdrawal from leadership is that it has created a vacuum, and into that vacuum have stepped bad actors like Russia and China and Iran and even ISIS [Islamic State]. That will change on January 20, 2017. As I mentioned, on the first day in office, I will abrogate this catastrophic Iranian nuclear deal. Also on the first day of office, I will begin the process of moving the American embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, the once and eternal capital of Israel.
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2.Middle East Forum(http://www.meforum.org/5578/roman-al-jazeera)
MEF in the Media
Gregg Roman on the 'Inextricable Connection' between Islamists and Hitler
Middle East Forum director Gregg Roman appeared alongside Mouin Rabbani, a senior fellow at the Institute for Palestine Studies, and Sakarya University professor Norman Finkelstein on Al-Jazeera English on October 22 to discuss Benjamin Netanyahu's controversial statement that Palestinian Grand Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini contributed to Nazi planning of the Holocaust.
Excerpt
moderator: Gregg, do you think Netanyahu expected such a backlash?
Gregg Roman: No, but I also think there were several points in Netanyahu's speech that were not factually accurate, like Mr. Finkelstein said. For instance, he said the mufti died in Cairo in 1974 from cancer. He actually died in Beirut. But I think the real element of what we have to look at here regarding the mufti's involvement, not just with the Holocaust but [with] Palestinian and Arab incitement against Jews, is the history of the mufti's meetings with Hitler.
In February 1941, an invitation was extended from Hitler to the mufti in Jerusalem [to come to] Berlin. The meeting didn't take place until November 28, 1941. This is all available in the German foreign record ... The mufti and Hitler met in Berlin. There were four agreements that came to be. And of those agreements, one would be the use of the mufti's propaganda trying to rally Arabs in coming for a Middle Eastern Holocaust that was going to be planned. And this is also part of the historical record. I would even ...
moderator: All right, but hang on a second Gregg. Let me ask you, why would the prime minister of a country, why would the prime minister of Israel, be standing in front of the world and making factually incorrect statements?
Roman: Sometimes politicians make factually incorrect statements. However, I don't think he was trying to point to the historical record as his general point. I think what he was trying to point to was the linkage between the mufti, his ideological heir Yasser Arafat, and subsequently Palestinian incitement that's going on today, as being of the same lineage as the mufti's hatred toward Jews. That's the wider issue of what he was trying to bring up. The context in how he did it may have been incorrect. However, I have to say, the element, pathos of what he was talking about was correct.
・Middle East Forum director Gregg Roman and Mouin Rabbani on Al-Jazeera English
Mouin Rabbani: ... Trying to trivialize this by saying that politicians make factually inaccurate mistakes. Well, suppose that, for example, Mahmoud Abbas were to get up today and say, "actually, the Holocaust was not Hitler's idea, it was proposed to him by David Ben Gurion and Chaim Weizmann in order to justify the creation of the state of Israel." Imagine the outrage. We wouldn't have someone like John Kerry saying both side need to tone down the rhetoric. Imagine the outrage if a Palestinian leader had said something similar. So, to seek to trivialize this is, I think, quite obscene.
I also do think, however, it raises an opportunity for another important discussion we need to have. And that is the role of the Zionist movement in the 30s and the 40s. Now, Netanyahu is the heir to that faction of the pre-state Zionist movement eventually known as revisionism, which was in fact inspired by fascism, albeit an Italian variant led by Mussolini. Um, and during World War II, in 1941, one faction of that movement, which was eventually led by Yitzhak Shamir, made an approach to Nazi Germany, during the Holocaust I should add, proposing an alliance with Berlin against the British, who then ruled Palestine. So, there's a long history here. Netanyahu today is the heir and the leader of that wing of the Zionist movement.
...
Roman: ... So let me address the incitement narrative that I was asked about by the interviewer.
moderator: Yes, please.
・Hitler and Husseini in Berlin, November 1941
Roman: The roots of Palestinian incitement come from Haj Amin al-Husseini, the former grand mufti of Jerusalem. In his ... [Damascus memoirs], written only in Arabic and not translated into English until 2014, when a book came out called Nazis, Islamists, and the Making of the Modern Middle East, we see that the grand mufti himself describes the protocols of his meetings with Hitler [inaudible] ... trying to claim responsibility for incitement that took place in North Africa and in the Middle East, even taking responsibility for the Farhud, which was the June 1941 pogrom against Jews in Baghdad.
There is an inescapable and inextricable connection between Islamists in the 1940s and the Nazi movement. And to make the claim that there was any kind of effort to have an 'unholy alliance' between Zionism and Nazism is absurd. The conversation that took place between Shamir and ...
Rabbani (interrupting): It's documented. It is in the public record.
Roman: ... that conversation that we're talking about was not an alliance against the British, it was an effort to try to extract Jews from Europe so they wouldn't die in the gas chambers.
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3. Algemeiner（http://www.algemeiner.com）
The Mufti and the Holocaust, Revisited
23 October 2015
by Ben Cohen / JNS.org
JNS.org – “If a man was a Jew, it was good enough for him to be killed or stamped out,” wrote a senior British official serving abroad to his superiors in London in 1929.
From where was this gentleman—Major Alan Saunders—writing his dispatch? From Munich or Berlin or any of the other German cities where Hitler’s Nazi Party was gaining supporters and street thugs? In fact, no. Major Saunders was the head of the British Police in Palestine during the mandate period, and his statement concerned the massacre by Arabs, in August 1929, of 69 Jews in Hebron, a city where their community had been a consistent presence for at least two millennia.
I was reminded of Major Saunders’s pithy summary of the motive behind the Hebron pogrom when news broke of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to the World Zionist Congress in Jerusalem, in which he essentially argued that it was the Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, who crystallized the idea of the mass extermination of the Jews in Adolf Hitler’s mind. But before I talk about the controversy that followed these comments, I want to make a couple of more general observations by way of introduction.
The first is that while Hitler unarguably remains the most powerful and devastating anti-Semite to ever hold state power, he was far from the only one at that time to approach the “Jewish question” in exterminationist terms. As Major Saunders related from faraway Palestine, about an episode that presaged the Nazi atrocities that were to follow in Germany and then in occupied Europe and North Africa, the same hatred of Jews simply for being Jews was in painful evidence there. For there were thousands, even millions, of ordinary people in Europe and the Middle East who regarded the Jews as a social and religious poison and wanted them—all of them—dead. In that sense, the Fuhrer was their representative and their master.
The second is that, as an Israeli Jew, Netanyahu is naturally sensitive to the Palestinian Arab dimension of the broader issue of collaboration with the Nazis, something I can relate to. As a kid, I remember sitting around my grandfather’s table with his relatives from Bosnia—men with sad eyes and the muscles and paunches of retired boxers, who had spent their youths in the Socialist-Zionist Hashomer Hatzair movement, graduating to fight with Marshal Tito’s communist partisans against the Nazi occupation of Yugoslavia that began in 1941. Men who, I realized with awe, had actually killed some of these Nazis that I’d seen in the movies.
And yet, when they spoke about the war, their anger really flowed when they remembered the locals who had assisted the Germans. Like Netanyahu now, what they found hardest to stomach was the spectacle of those non-Jews who lived alongside them collaborating with the Nazi extermination program.
In the pantheon of Nazi collaborators, Mufti Hajj Amin al-Husseini is right up there with Pavelic in Croatia, Petain in France, Horthy in Hungary, and all the other quislings—their name comes from the collaborationist leader in Norway, Vidkun Quisling—who implemented Hitler’s will. It was, ironically, the British authorities who appointed him to his position in 1921. During the 1929 massacre in Hebron, as during the openly anti-Semitic 1936-39 Arab revolt in Palestine, al-Husseini proved himself a confirmed Jew-hater and the natural ally of Hitler in the Arab and Muslim worlds.
It wasn’t until November 1941 that the Mufti met Hitler in person. Significantly, in the view of many historians, that encounter in Berlin took place two months before the Wannsee conference, where leading Nazis led by Hitler’s security chief, Reinhard Heydrich, plotted the implementation of the “Final Solution”—the extermination of the Jews.
In the official German record of their discussions (not an exact transcript, but a summary of what was said), it was clear that both Hitler and the Mufti were already in agreement that the Holocaust had to be visited upon the Jews. For his part, the Mufti expressed his appreciation of Germany’s commitment to the “elimination of the Jewish national home,” while Hitler restated his “active opposition to the Jewish national home in Palestine, which was nothing other than a center, in the form of a state, for the exercise of destructive influence by Jewish interests.”
For good measure, the Fuhrer added that “Germany was also aware that the assertion that the Jews were carrying out the functions of economic pioneers in Palestine was a lie. The work there was done only by the Arabs, not by the Jews”—a slander that could easily be expressed in the exact same words by the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement that targets the “Jewish national home” in our own time.
That last point highlights a critical factor which the furore around Netanyahu’s speech—much of it generated by visceral opponents of Israel who only talk about the Holocaust when it justifies their backing of Palestinian violence against Jews now—has largely missed.
During the 1930s, both Germany and Palestine were the sites of mob violence, boycotts, and discriminatory laws and regulations against Jews. The Nazi consolidation of power in the 1930s was what enabled them to launch their campaign of war and genocide at the end of that decade.
Had Palestine been conquered by the Germans from the British, there is no doubt that the Mufti would have been installed as the local quisling, and that the entire Jewish population would have been shipped to concentration and death camps in Europe—assuming that the Germans and their Arab militias didn’t build similar camps in the vicinity, of course. That was the mutual vision expressed in Berlin in 1941, the distinctly Arab contribution to the achievement of the “Thousand Year Reich.”
As the German historian Matthias Kuentzel has noted, the 700,000 Jews in the Middle East were in Hitler’s sights when he received the Mufti.
“As Hitler envisaged it, after the assault on the Soviet Union, the Wehrmacht would also occupy the Caucasus and so open the way to the Middle East…Part of this scenario was the killing of the Jews,” Kuentzel writes. Even though this grand ambition failed, the Mufti was still able, as the prominent Israeli Holocaust historian Yehuda Bauer put it, to be “an active partner in devising the Final Solution.” The Mufti also played a role in its implementation, raising three SS divisions composed of Bosnian and Albanian Muslims in the western Balkans.
Nor did the Mufti forget Palestine. The Israeli scholar Edy Cohen has revealed how, in May 1943, he blocked a deal agreed to by the British and the Germans to allow 4,000 Jewish children to enter Palestine in exchange for 20,000 German prisoners of war, while in 1944, he parachuted a terror cell into Tel Aviv with the intention of poisoning the local water supply.
The Mufti, disgracefully, escaped the Nuremburg Trials of Nazi war criminals, and ended his days in Beirut in 1974. His legacy survives in the daily incitement against Jews that emanates from Palestinian official and social media. So, when considering the latest Netanyahu controversy, please remember this: Those Holocaust scholars who criticized Netanyahu’s speech nonetheless recognize the fundamental, bitter fact of Palestinian anti-Semitism and the Mufti’s position in fomenting it. It is the Palestinian leadership and their supporters—who have neither offered an apology nor reparations for the Mufti’s crimes against the Jews—who don’t.
・Ben Cohen, senior editor of TheTower.org & The Tower Magazine, writes a weekly column for JNS.org on Jewish affairs and Middle Eastern politics. His writings have been published in Commentary, the New York Post, Haaretz, The Wall Street Journal, and many other publications. He is the author of “Some of My Best Friends: A Journey Through Twenty-First Century Antisemitism” (Edition Critic, 2014).
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