America recognizes Israeli Sovereignty over the Golan Heights
America recognizes Israeli Sovereignty over the Golan Heights
On Purim Day last week, President Trump tweeted that the time long was overdue for the world to recognize Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights. As this President has done in so many other ways, he leads not from behind but from up front.  We already have learned what it is like when America is led by Obama’s method of leading from behind.

By actualizing on Monday the message embodied in his Purim Day tweet, as he signed the historic measure recognizing the Golan as part of Israel, the President’s deed not only formalized the obvious but reminded us of the perfidy of Obama’s final days.

Recall the last days of the Obama Wasted Decade before the Left Mediacracy’s Chosen One passed into the dustbin of history. Obama had two final missions remaining to complete after the Democrats had lost the White House to Donald Trump:

(1) Sabotage the forthcoming Trump Presidency by steps taken within the Obama Justice Department and intelligence agencies assuring that a fallacious dossier would be leaked to the media and proffered to a gullible FISA court in order to obtain warrants to surveil American citizens associated with the Trump campaign and incoming Administration, and to raise the specter of Trump collusion with Putin to get elected.

(2) Stab Israel in the back one last time and turn the handle slowly, slowly.

  • Obama’s legacy. Eight bleak and dismal years of never attaining meaningful economic growth, while increasing dependency at home on welfare and food stamps, amid stagnant employment and dead wages especially adversely impacting unemployment in the Black and Hispanic communities.
  • Obama’s legacy. Watching Russia seize the Crimea and expand her influence throughout the globe while Obama defaulted on America’s promise to station a defensive missile shield in the Czech Republic and Poland.
  • Obama’s legacy. Feeble and impotent in the face of of a rising ISIS and their decapitations and other barbaric depravities, later messing up in Benghazi after mishandling Khaddafi in greater Libya, even as he failed to support the Green movement in Iran that desperately challenged the mullahs. 
  • Obama’s legacy. Emptying Gitmo by releasing proven terrorists who would proceed to murder again — all in return for Bo Bergdahl, whom only Obama’s moronic national security advisor could say had served with “distinction and honor.”
  • Obama’s legacy. Presiding over the incineration of cities like Ferguson and Baltimore while igniting racial tensions and divisions across the country from Michael Brown (the “Hands up, Don’t Shoot” lie) to Freddie Gray (all officers acquitted) to Trayvon Martin (would have looked like his son).
  •  Obama’s legacy. Bonding with the terrorist Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt that overthrew our ally Hosni Mubarak, tango’ing with new terrorist friends in Castro Cuba and Hugo Chavez Venezuela, all while distancing from many of America’s closest allies including Great Britain and Israel.
  • Obama’s legacy. Allowing China to expand her geographic dominance in the Pacific even as she continued stealing our intellectual property with impunity and went about hacking our government computer files to obtain private data on thousands of American citizens. 
  • Obama’s legacy.  The coarsening of American culture, bringing the likes of an Al Sharpton into the White House more than seventy times, depriving falsely accused college students of fundamental constitutional protections, allowing the IRS to be weaponized to destroy political opponents, allowing the immigration system to collapse on the southern border while permitting Sanctuary Cities to arise and entrench.  Obama’s legacy.
  • Obama’s legacy. Never calling “Islamic terror” by its name but instead characterizing it as “workplace violence” and responding to the Charlie Hebdo massacre by failing to appear at the international memorial with all other world leaders but instead having John Kerry fly to France later with James Taylor on his bicycle to sing “You’ve Got a Friend.” 
  • Obama’s legacy. The Iran Deal, a plane loaded with $150 billion cash to the Mullahs.
  • Obama’s legacy. Forcing Catholic and other objecting religious institutions to provide birth control for their employees.
  • Obama’s legacy. Solyndra and the California high-speed rail to nowhere, shovel-ready jobs. 

Part of that Obama legacy was undertaking to destroy America’s unique relationship with Israel, dating to Israel’s founding in 1948, a friendship that always had been marked by bi-partisan support. He continually attacked Israel and its freely elected leadership, attempted with John Kerry’s State Department to sabotage that country’s 2015 elections by covertly colluding with left-wing interest groups there, funneling them State Department funding.

Finally, in December 2016 as he saw his “legacy” roundly rejected by America’s voters after his hand-picked successor was soundly defeated by a political novice, he vengefully took one last churlish swipe at Israel. The United Nations — the most dependably anti-Jewish body in the world since the fall of Nazi Germany — undertook to pass a resolution that would deny Israeli rights even to East Jerusalem.  These resolutions always get vetoed by the United States, the only country politically strong enough to stare down Arab Muslim oil oligarchs who otherwise intimidate even the European democracies both financially and by virtue of the ever-increasing Arab Muslim populations that now define West European political and electoral calculations.

But, on his way out the White House door for the last time, Obama ordered his U.N. Ambassador, Samantha Power, to abstain on the vote, not to veto it.  Without that always-theretofore-dependable American veto, the resolution passed. The nations who ganged up on Israel actually rose to cheer in the Security Council chamber, as they proclaimed that Jews and Israel have no right to live even in East Jerusalem.  A final mold spore attached to Obama’s legacy.

To which Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu responded:

“Israel rejects this shameful anti-Israel resolution at the U.N. and will not abide by its terms. At a time when the Security Council does nothing to stop the slaughter of half a million people in Syria, it disgracefully gangs up on the one true democracy in the Middle East, Israel, and calls the Western Wall ‘occupied territory.’ ”

And President-elect Trump tweeted ominously: “As to the U.N., things will be different after Jan. 20th.”

When President Donald Trump entered the White House, he made good on promise after promise, healing each abscess of Obama’s legacy, abscess by abscess. 

  • He opened oil drilling in ANWAR and revitalized hydraulic fracturing, setting America on a path to become a net exporter of energy. 
  • He required that two administrative regulations be gutted for each new agency regulation adopted.
  • He took us out of the myopic Paris Climate Agreement, which would have forced America uniquely to bear the world’s environmental burdens while Russia, China, India, and Arab oligarchies continue polluting away.
  • He pried us out of Obama’s disastrous Iran Deal.
  • He changed the tenor of the United States Supreme Court with truly conservative judicial appointments and has been doing the same for the federal appellate circuits and district courts. 
  • He extended civil-liberties protections to falsely accused college students, and he more recently has ordered that universities be denied federal grants when they do not protect First Amendment speech.
  • He terminated the individual mandate, the core of Obamacare.
  • He authorized construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, which Obama had blocked. 
  • He favorably changed the terms of America’s trade agreements with Mexico and Canada, and he began the long arduous process of changing the terms of trading with China — and what we expect of them.

In the same way, he restored our Mideast priorities.  President Trump made clear that he saw through the corrupt Palestine Authority that has not held an election since dictator and lifelong terrorist Abu Mazen (“Mahmoud Abbas”) was elected to a four-year term thirteen years ago.

So he pulled us out of the ridiculously named “U.N. Human Rights Council,” a murder of crows that includes most of the world’s bloodiest cutthroat dictatorships. Pulled us out of UNESCO. Cut out American funding for a Palestine Authority that uses the money to pay lifetime cash bounties to the families of convicted terrorists and murderers. Shut down their PLO Washington, D.C, headquarters. Cut off funding to UNRWA, another fraudulent U.N. agency that promotes terrorism by facilitating its inculcation at schools for the young. 

He recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, moved America’s Israel embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, authorized his Secretary of State to be the first to visit the Western Wall accompanied by the Prime Minister of Israel. 

And now he has recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights in accordance with his executive authority. U.S. Const. Art. II, § 3, Cl. 4; see alsoZivotofsky v. Kerry, 576 U.S. 1059 (2015).

Israel liberated the Golan Heights during the June 1967 Six-Day War. Egypt’s president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, had blockaded the Straits of Tiran, an act of war. He had ordered the United Nations to remove all peace-keeping forces from the Sinai Desert, to get them out of the way for the invasion he was launching from the southwest. Syria agreed to open a northeastern front simultaneously. Jordan’s King Hussein opened a third simultaneous front and attacked Israel from the east. The slogan was: “Drive the Jews into the [Mediterranean] Sea!”

When you start a war, sometimes you win, and sometimes you lose. The Arab Muslim countries lost. Syria lost the Golan Heights, a strategic high ground overlooking northern Israel. Those lands always had been part of historical Israel. In the past half century, Mideast archaeologists have unearthed 34 synagogues there from the past.

Meanwhile, Syria has remained in a permanent state of war with Israel since the day of its founding. Now the Iranians are trying to embed themselves and their weapons in Syria, to attack Israel, and even have fired rockets into Israel from Syria. Israel cannot allow the mullahs access to mountainous high ground overlooking northern Israel from which to attack. Between 1949-1967, Syrians used that high ground to shell northern Israel, including the Hula Valley and Rosh Pina communities, even to shoot at fishermen in the Sea of Galilee, killing 140 civilians during that period.

In similar vein, pro-Soviet Syria attempted to invade the pro-West Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan in 1970. President Richard Nixon asked then-Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir for assistance to repel the Syrian attack so that America would not have to send troops there. Israel responded promptly by reinforcing its military presence on the Golan Heights, triggering a swift rollback of the Syrian invasion, thereby securing Jordan’s survival while allowing America to avoid getting bogged down militarily there.

Indeed, why would America want that high ground to be in Iranian hands?  Or even in Syrian hands?  Do we have no other parts of the Arab Muslim world where our boys are tied up, sometimes blown up, and where our defense budget is being expended? Do we need yet another anti-American radical Islamistan theater in which to get bogged down?  With all the insanity that exists throughout the Arab Muslim world, we cannot even “enjoy” being “friends” with “nice” Arab Muslim governments like Saudi Arabia before they end up savaging some Washington Post contributor and provoking a crisis . . . or having fifteen of their Wahabi Islam darlings create a 9-11 attack on the World Trade Center.

So how could it conceivably be in America’s interest to have yet another Arab Muslimstan terrorist jungle added to the United Nations zoo?

Coinciding with the White House’s recognition, Secretary of State Pompeo said during his recent visit to Israel:

“As a [West Point] cadet, I studied the battles of the Golan. There's a famous battle called the ‘Battle of the Valley of Tears,’ and it was Israeli heroism at its most amazing, saving this great nation at a time of enormous challenge, a threat that came from east of the Golan, from Syria, a tank battle of epic and historic proportion, of amazing Israeli bravery. Tonight President Trump made the decision to recognize that that hard-fought real estate, that important place, is proper to be a sovereign part of the state of Israel. ...The people of Israel should know that the battles they fought, the lives that they lost on that very ground, were worthy and meaningful and important for all time.” 

Obama thought he was inserting two more screws into his legacy when, as he exited for the dustbin, he set in motion the process by which incoming President Trump would be accused of colluding with Russia and by which Israel would be forced to abandon the homes of nearly 800,000 Jews who now live in East Jerusalem and throughout the rest of liberated Judea and Samaria and the Golan.

Now both of Obama’s final screws have been unscrewed.  The Mueller report has exonerated the President of all charges of collusion. And the President has recognized Israel’s sovereignty over all of Jerusalem and the Golan Heights.

It was a sweet touch that the President made the Golan Heights announcement on Purim Day. It would have been just as sweet if he had announced it on Obama’s birthday. Perhaps we can save that celebration for when the United States someday recognizes Israeli sovereignty over Judea and Samaria.

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