Howard Epstein – THE FRENCH HORROR STORY AND OBAMA’S LEGACY
THE FRENCH HORROR STORY AND OBAMA’S LEGACY. ONE COIN: TWO SIDES
What happened in France last Thursday evening is utterly shocking to all right-thinking people. It is, however, unlikely that anybody empathizes with the French today more keenly than the Israelis; but we do so with an added layer of grief that is peculiar to us. We could simply say “I told you so”, but our reaction is much more nuanced than that.
In a piece in last Friday’s (London) Times entitled: Isis Video Suggested Turning Cars Into “Mowing Machines”, Tom Coghlin, writing from Beirut, reported on how:-
“Jihadist supporters acting alone used cars to attack crowds in the French cities of Valence in January 2016; in Nantes and in Dijon both in December 2014, and in Quebec, Canada in October 2014”.
Beirut is but 146 miles, as the crow flies, from Jerusalem, and the Israeli capital hosts one of the biggest foreign press corps in the world (for where else can you live in style and yet be so close to so many actual or potential war-fronts?). Accordingly, it seems unlikely (although he made no reference to it) that Coghlin did not know of the many occasions that vehicles have been used to mow down and kill Israeli citizens, mostly in Jerusalem. Using vehicles as varied as a stolen taxi to JCB earth-movers (the latter were the weapon of choice of Arab men, employed by Israeli companies to operate them), there was a rash of such fatal attacks (at least two in 2008 and 2011, three in 2014 and more in 2015) until they ceased (like plane hijacking and other phenomena) to represent the terrorists’ modus operandi of choice. (More recently, in Israel, it has been the steak knife. Somewhat inefficient and usually suicidal. What next?)
Seen from Israel, the terrorism now afflicting Europe appears (whilst wholly-unjustifiable, of course) in some ways self-induced. Have the Euros never heard of “copy-cat killing”?
For over 40 years, the Euros have funded the Sunni Palestinians. Eschewing the fishing rod, the donors have supplied fish, and thereby corrupted the Palestinian economy, to the detriment of the people, humiliating them with constant hand-outs. Much of the money remitted from Europe was “invested” in terror, some of it reported in the West but most not – the victims were not Europeans but “only” Jews.
But what went on was not lost on the demographic who are drawn to crime and terror: young men, driven by hatred, often psychotic and under a certain amount of peer pressure to earn the modern equivalent of Teutonic dueling scars. In the Second Intifada, blood-splattered streets in Israel 
became the New Normal in their minds and, as the twisted romance that that perversely conjured up took root in their psyche, it was only a matter of time before other Sunnis extended the activity – copy-cat style – beyond Israel to Europe.
The Euros have sown the seeds of this and they now reap the whirlwind.
Still they do not see it. President Francois Hollande, appropriately quick to grieve over lives lost in Nice is undetectable in his presumed vicarious grief when the Pals kill our kids in their beds (most recently, 13 year old Hallel Yaffa Ariel in Kiryat Araba on June 30 last) – and then seemingly fails to notice the Pals openly celebrating it. Want a street named after you in Ramallah? Go kill an Israeli kid. But objection from the Euros comes there none. Instead they give Abu Mazen a half-minute standing ovation when he spouts his usual anti-Semitic drivel (about well-poisoning) at the European Parliament.
It’s coffee time, Francois. Wake up and smell it. It smells like the blood congealed on the Promenade des Anglais, in Nice – and on the bed-sheets of Hallel. Strange that, n’est-ce pas, Francois? If you prick us, do we not bleed the same sickly-sweet smelling blood?
And here is another aphorism for you, Monsieur le Président: Ask not for whom the Sunni terrorist bell tolls. It tolls for us and for you. That means you Francois. For you and all Euros. Do you doubt it, Francois? Then you are a member of a minority of Euros for, according to a recent Pew Research Centre poll, the majority of Europeans believe that the migrant influx has increased the risk of terrorist attacks.
Instead of castigating Israel at every turn, the Euros should appreciate what is happening in Asian and African countries. As with the Turks before them – recently returned (and, reportedly, coming soon, even the Saudis) – the zeitgeist is increasingly to work with Israel, share in its technologies, draw it closer and closer to it, and (in its region) squeeze under its umbrella as a shelter from Iranian aggression.
That is now, but decades ago, just as every Western leader (as with Hollande this weekend) says after every terrorist attack: we shall never give in to terror, the Euros should have told their Palestinian clients that Israel, too, would never give into terror. Democracies just don’t do that.
The Euros should have made it clear to the Pals that the Euros would not continue to fund their terror, if only because it would be a waste of money as an instrument to gain concessions from the Israelis. And the Euros should have said that they expected their Palestinian dependents to make peace with the only democratic state in the Middle East, and deal with it not through terror but by negotiation.
It is not too late.
If Abbas could be succeeded – with a push from the Euros – by a Gandhi, Martin Luther King or Nelson Mandela adherent, the Israeli world would become the Palestinians’ oyster. And if they, the progenitors of terror in our time, were to renounce it, that would have a galvanizing effect on all other terror groups. Then there would indeed be light at the end of what today appears to be a very long, very dark tunnel.
In the meantime, in France, and elsewhere in Europe, the horror show may be expected to go on.
-ooOoo-
In the meantime, over the Pond, The Donald, is beginning to draw ahead of the Lesser-Crested Clinton in key battleground states, most notably Florida and Pennsylvania. Despite the conversion to Judaism of his daughter, Ivanka – the Trump with everything, given that she is as brilliant as she is beautiful – not being recognized by Israeli Rabbanim, it is not delusional to think that a President Trump would both call time on Iran’s flouting of the JCPOA and move the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem.
Before we start to enjoy those concepts, however, we should perceive the dangers presented by a humiliated President Obama, and the horror show that could emerge.
In my last week’s blog, I wrote that the notion of the upcoming joint naval and air exercises between Russia and Israel was definitive of the retreat of Pax Americana in this region. The only people who may not have picked up on this are Obama and the Greater- Crested Kerry. Even as Kerry arrives in Moscow with a plan, to which he hopes the 
Russians will agree, which envisages, down the road, the removal of Assad, the Butcher of Damascus, the USA is in reality stepping out in a traditional Russian dance – backdrop the missile shield and jets with which Putin rules Syrian skies (and therefore everything else around there) – as Putin plays the balalaika. The song* is entitled “Pax Russiya” and the lyrics are so simple that Obama and Kerry (also rather simple) pick them up immediately (roughly translated), thus: –
Assad (whom you , Barak, vowed to remove)
Shall win his little local game
That has killed hundreds of thousands
And displaced millions
And destabilizes Europe.
[Refrain – by Barak]
OK, Vlad. If you say so, If you say so
Assy receives his get-out of jail-free card
He passes Go and picks up his $200 (and more)
And he is free to throw both dice
Onto the bloody Syrian Monopoly board
Into the indefinite future.
[Space does allow for publication of the next eight verses.]
[Refrain – by Barak]
OK, Vlad. If you say so, If you say so
[It ends – tout ensemble]
Long Live the Russia Fatherland and its friend Syria.
There is humiliation aplenty for Obama also in the American homeland, replete with insecurity.
Race relations are at fifty year low, with the real possibility of open warfare between white and black on the streets. This is not exactly the legacy that a Nobel Peace prizewinning US president, disparagingly referred to in African-American circles now as the Halfrican Obama, should be bequeathing to the American people.
It gets worse, although I doubt that Obama is even aware of it.
Apart from the disastrous end of Carter’s presidential days (with 52 diplomat hostages ending 444 days of captivity in the US embassy in Tehran, as the former peanut farmer handed the seal of office over to Ronald Regan) and the similarly calamitous ending of the presidency of the disgraced Richard Nixon, one other tragic end of White House tenure is seen in regard to LBJ, eaten whole by the riotous reaction to his expansion of the Vietnam War.
Yet LBJ’s legacy in other ways is a fine one, for in pursuing his Great Society and his War on Poverty, he oversaw the introduction of Head Start, Food Stamps, Medicare and Medicaid, and Public Service Radio, all of which endure to this day.
There is more:-
- under LBJ, between 1965 and 1968, black-family income rose as a proportion of white-family income, from 54 percent to 60 percent.
- under Obama, in contradistinction to LBJ’s record, according to Investor’s Business Daily of December 12, 2014:
“Using data from Federal Reserve’s once-every-three years Survey of Consumer Finances, Pew found that the median net worth of blacks dropped 34% during the Obama recovery, going from $16,600 in 2010 to $11,000 in 2013.
That’s a steeper decline than occurred from 2007 to 2010, when blacks’ net worth fell 13.5%.
In other words, black families suffered a bigger drop in net worth during Obama’s recovery than they did during the Bush recession.”
It is plain that Obama is in serious need of a legacy.
Oh no! He wouldn’t seek to establish it with a dramatic gesture to the Palestinians at Israel’s expense would he? With a US-led UN Security Council vote that will condemn Israel to mandatory sanctions unless we buckle under and make swingeing concessions to the Palestinians? That would certainly serve his end(s).
Would Obama really do it? Running out of time now, what other opportunities for a significant legacy does he have?
-ooOoo-
* As imagined by the author.
© Howard Epstein July 2106
Howard Epstein’s book: Guns, Traumas and Exceptionalism: America in the Twenty-First Century will be published on Kindle in the coming week
