“.. we have been talking to the Iranians, almost non stop, for 30 years. There isn’t an American president from Jimmy Carter to the present who has not authorized negotiations with Iran. The classic case occurred during the Clinton administration. We ended all kinds of sanctions against Iran, let all kinds of Iranians into the U.S. for the first time since the 1970’s, had sporting matches with the Iranians, hosted Iranian cultural events, and unfroze Iranian bank accounts. Then President Clinton and Secretary of State Madeline Albright started publicly apologizing to Iran for this and that. But when all was said and done, Ali Khamenei reminded everyone that Iran is in a state of war with the U.S., and that was the end of negotiations.”

from Understanding Iran by Michael Ledeen in Hillsdale’s Imprimis.

HKO comment- while we arrogantly discuss our preconditions to negotiate with Iran, the more pertinent question is what are their preconditions to negotiate with us.

Sunnis believe that we know the succession of Mohammed therefore religious leaders should function in government.

Shiites believe that the rightful successor to Mohamemd is yet to come and therefore no religious leader should sit in a positon of government power. This is why Shiite leaders in Iraq do not participate in Parliament.

But this Shiite position broke down in Iran when Khomeini took over in 1979. He not only thought religious leaders should be allowed to govern, he considered it mandatory.

While they have a theological disagreement the Sunnis and Shiites have been able to work together since the beginning of the Iranian Revolution. Arafat was a Sunni and trained the early Iranian Revolutionary Guard which is largely Shiite. The two groups also worked together to overthrow the Shah.

Those who claim that Sunnis and Shias can not work togther ignore the reality on the ground.

Info above paraphrased from “Understanding Iran” by Michale Ledeen written int the Hillsdale College – Imprimis.

The greatest proponents for a pro Israel policy are the evangelical Christians and the Jews, in that order. It is a given that the evangelicals will have little influence in an Obama administration. The Jewish leverage is at risk if they do not support Obama and he wins. Many would question how much influence they would have if they supported him and he did win.

Carter wrote off his Jewish support early in his campaign. In this old article from Jason Maoz , Jimmy Carter’s Jewish Problem, he spoke of the politics and Carter’s disdain for the Jewish voters.

Excerpts:

Speechwriter Bob Shrum quit the Carter campaign after just a few weeks, disgusted with what he described as Carter’s penchant for fudging the truth. He also related that Carter, convinced the Jewish vote in the Democratic primaries would go to Senator Henry (“Scoop”) Jackson, had instructed his staff not to issue any more statements on the Middle East.

“Jackson has all the Jews anyway,” Shrum quoted Carter as saying. “We get the Christians.”

Relations between Carter and Israel were tense from the outset of the Carter presidency. Carter’s hostility was evident to Israeli foreign minister Moshe Dayan, who in his memoir Breakthrough described a July 1977 White House meeting between Carter and Israeli officials. “You are more stubborn than the Arabs, and you put obstacles on the path to peace,’’ an angry Carter scolded Dayan and his colleagues.

“Our talk,” Dayan wrote, “lasted more than an hour and was most unpleasant. President Carter … launched charge after charge against Israel.”

Former New York mayor Ed Koch, in his 1984 bestseller Mayor, recounted a conversation he had shortly before the 1980 election with Cyrus Vance, who’d recently resigned as Carter’s secretary of state. Koch told Vance that many Jews would not be voting for Carter because they feared “that if he is reelected he will sell them out.”

“Vance,” recalled Koch, “nodded and said, ‘He will.’ ”

In Dangerous Liaison: The Inside Story of the U.S.-Israeli Covert Relationship, Andrew and Leslie Cockburn revealed that during a March 1980 meeting with his senior political advisers, Carter, discussing his fading reelection prospects and his sinking approval rating in the Jewish community, snapped, “If I get back in, I’m going to [expletive] the Jews.”

Carter – such was the country’s good fortune – did not get back in. But as evidenced by his years of pro-Palestinian advocacy, reams of anti-Israel op-ed articles, and the release last week of his latest book/screed, Palestine Peace Not Apartheid, he’s been trying to [expletive] the Jews ever since.

HKO comments- There is no assurance that Obama will be another Jimmy Carter, but given the number of advisors who hold similar views to Carter it not hard to understand Jewish reluctance if it occurs.

It is also worth noting that Carter got overwhelming support from the Jews for his first term , but substantially fewer Jewish votes for the attempt at his second. In 1976 Carter got 71% of the Jewish vote. In 1980 he got 45%; Reagan received 39% and Independent Party John Anderson got 14%. Go here for a history of Jewish voting patterns. Carter got the worst Jewish support of any Democratic nominee since the Depression.

Triple Cross: How Britain Created the Arab-Israel Conflict
By Rachel Neuwirth

in American Thinker.

Rachel writes a wonderful article about the incredible hypocrisy of the British media and academics constantly condemning Israel when the British themselves were monumentally repsonsible for creating the mess in the Middle East to begin with. Her article is a great brief history of the British rape of Palestine and its consequences.

excerpts

Outside of the Muslim countries, no press in the world is as biased, as unfair, and as dishonest and vindictive towards Israel as the British press. The BBC and the newspapers The Guardian and The Independent take the lead in relentlessly vilifying the Jewish state, but Sky News, Reuters, The Economist and numerous other major media outlets do not lag far behind them in their race to see which can defame and malign Israel the most. Israel is incessantly castigated as an imperialist and colonialist power whose people stole their country from its “indigenous” and rightful owners, the “Palestinians.”

That the press of a country that at one time or another conquered a substantial chunk of the entire world by the most ruthless and deceitful means imaginable (consider, for example, Sir Walter Raleigh’s frank account of the murderous treachery that he employed to seize Trinidad from the Spanish, or Sir Francis Drake’s ruthless plundering of the Spanish colonies) should castigate as colonialist, imperialist and racist a country that, even including the “occupied” territories, is only the size of Wales — which, by the way, is yet another country that England conquered in a series of brutal wars — is hard to fathom. So is the British press’s outrage at Israel’s “undemocratic” rule over perhaps a million and a half Arabs, when Britain ruled for centuries in the most autocratic manner hundreds of millions of subjects, many more people than lived in Britain itself, to whom it gave no democratic rights whatsoever. Britain only surrendered this Empire when it was bankrupt after two world wars, and no longer had the means to hold onto it. Even then, she surrendered it only under intense prodding from the United States, whose help she absolutely needed to rebuild her shattered economy and defend herself.

Yet the press and government of this nation that ruled vast territories thousands of miles from its own shores, countries that posed no threat whatsoever to Britain, have the gall to condemn Israel for maintaining a few checkpoints in the “Palestinian” territories, located only a few miles or in some cases only a few yards from her major population centers, in order to prevent terrorists from bringing bombs into these population centers and using them to murder thousands of Israelis. And they have the gall to call these checkpoints an “occupation,” even after Israel unilaterally handed over most populated areas of the “occupied” territories (whose total size, in any case, is only equal to that of the English suburban county of Sussex) to her enemies, in a vain attempt to make peace with them.

The call for an excess profits tax on our oil companies is economically ignorant and dangerous. This was last tried under our worst president ever, Jimmy Carter, and it led to higher prices, and gas lines.

While we all feel the pain of higher gas prices, we at least have plenty of supply. Imagine what happens when building supplies and groceries do not get delivered because fuel is unavailable.

An excess profits tax inevitably becomes a confiscatory MARGINAL tax on the next gallon sold. When the next gallon sold is taxed heavily it will not be produced and distributed. Government economists are notoriously ignornant of the difference between marginal tax rates and average tax rates. Carter was the poster boy for the economically retarded on this issue. Schumer and Reid seek to revive Carter’s worst energy policies.

At a time when ethanol and bio fuels are becoming poor substitues we need to increase domestic production, not punish the very people we need to increase that production. The same morons who want to punish the oil producers have refused to allow any new refineries, or drilling on domestic properties, or the construction of nuclear plants, or any sensible policy that could easily reduce our dependency on foreign oil.

These vapid political hacks have no problem withe excess profits made by Microsoft or Warren Buffet or the high profits now being earned by farmers because of high food prices. But oil is the scapegoat for their decades of stupid policies that have handicapped domestic energy production.

There no problem we have that can not be made worse by these fools.