Antiwar.com Blog

Kerry Defines Middle East Policy

This is the first of what I hope will be many blog entries here. As those of you who read Justin’s article already know, I’m Antiwar.com’s latest hiree.

Today we got a glimpse at John Kerry’s official Middle East Policy. Now, obviously I wasn’t expecting Kerry to emerge as an antiwar candidate or anything, but some of this stuff is pretty surprising. Note that the stuff in italics isn’t paraphrase, nor is it an interpretation, these are direct quotes.

John Kerry understands that America must guarantee Israel’s military superiority

Now, its obviously been US policy to defend Israel from its many, many enemies. But I believe this is the first time its actually been suggested that it is America’s duty to keep Israel militarily superior to them. Obviously this means military aid, and lots of it. Indeed, elsewhere in the policy report Kerry brags about his record of opposing any cuts to Israeli aid.

John Kerry understands that anti-Semitism masked in anti-Israel rhetoric is a dangerous trend threatening both Israel and Jewish communities around the world.

Its been extremely fashionable, of course, to suggest that those who oppose any action by Israel are defacto anti-Semites (indeed, more than one Antiwar.com columnist has had that charge levied against him), but isn’t making such accusations more the job of the mainstream media than politicians?

Now that’s not surprising in and of itself, but the rest of the paragraph kind of was:

John Kerry has always fought against anti-Semitism and as president, he will take governments around the world to task for failing to address this escalating threat.

How does one address a belief that is considered threatening? There’s one obvious answer: censorship.

In the wake of this pretty much blind support of Israeli policies, there’s a question that’s begging to be asked. What’re the odds it will be? Pretty close to 0%, I’d say:

“Senator Kerry, recently Israel’s Deputy Defense Minister asserted that Israel could wipe out the entire Gaza Strip in a matter of hours. You have said in your Middle East Policy that you support the right of Israel to ‘eliminate threats’ to its citizens, would you support Israel taking such action, even though it would almost certainly result in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian civilians? “

Or was it Cheney’s run home? The New York Times reported in this article last Wednesday that VP Dick Cheney was booed during the seventh inning of the Yankees-Red Socks baseball game at Yankee Stadium the night before. According to Tristero: Fair and Balanced blog this is what really happened:

What the Times left out–and what we heard from two different people who attended the game–was that the booing, jeers and catcalls were so loud and so widespread that the Secret Service hustled the Vice President out of the stadium immediately, fearing for his safety.

Found an interesting website which keeps track of attacks on oil pipelines, installations and industry personnel in Iraq, starting in June of 2003 … here

Apparently this past month, June 2004, has been the worst, at least in terms of the number of incidents.

As they move ahead toward abandoning their pacifist constitution, Japan’s Navy is ahead of America’s in trying to appeal to the MTV generation. Check this out! This page actually appears on the Japanese Navy website.

Now read this hilarious article by Mike Rogers over at LewRockwell.com.

Reports continue to come in of Taliban terror attacks designed to disrupt the upcoming fall elections in Afghanistan – no one is spared: men, women, children, reporters. However, voters also continue to register although the original end-of-July deadline has passed.

Very intriguing interview with Elinor Burkett, author of So Many Enemies, So Little Time, appears today in Frontpage.com. A self-identified long-time lefty, she opines – and it seems obvious – that the real danger to women is fundamentalism. And she’s been there and seen it in Afghanistan and Iran. She has been amazed, as have I also, at U.S. feminists’ (NOW for instance) overwhelmingly Americentric perspective. But, hey, that’s just us Americans, right?

My old associate Tom Palmer, who is now a Senior Fellow (formerly Vice-President) of the Cato Institute, explains his foreign policy:

Our Enemies’ Handiwork
The radical Islamicists have shown us again what they really are. The world should see the photos they released of their latest act of savagery. What else can one do but find and kill all of them before they kill all the rest of us, Muslim and non-Muslim alike?

Thanks to Lew Rockwell for this story.