OUR WORLD: The international community and the liberal media
It should be an embarrassment to the New York Times and its colleagues that they have refused to report why Haley and Trump are demonstrably right to stand alone.
By CAROLINE B. GLICKUpdated: DECEMBER 20, 2017 19:32US Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley speaks during the United Nations Security Council meeting on the situation in the Middle East(photo credit: BRENDAN MCDERMID/REUTERS)
US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley glared at her colleagues at the UN Security Council Monday as she cast the lone nay vote against a draft resolution presented by Egypt to nullify US President Donald Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.Haley then berated her UN colleagues for their assault against US sovereignty and for their prolonged efforts to delegitimize Israel and blame the Jewish state for the absence of peace. In her words, “The United States refuses to accept the double standard that says we are not impartial when we stand by the will of the American people by moving our US embassy, but somehow the United Nations is a neutral party when it consistently singles out Israel for condemnation.”The liberal media, led by The New York Times chastised her.“Punctuating America’s increasing international isolation, the United Nations Security Council demanded on Monday that the Trump administration rescind its decisions to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and to put the United States Embassy there,” the Times wrote in a purported news article.While attacking Trump and Haley for isolating the US, the Times and its colleagues failed to explain what an international community-aligned US foreign policy looks like.Notably, just such a policy and its consequences were the subject of a 15,000-word investigative report published Monday morning by Politico.“The secret backstory of how Obama let Hezbollah off the hook,” by Josh Meyer, detailed how in the interest of advancing a policy supported by the international community, then president Barack Obama imperiled US public health, national security and its allies.As Meyer recalled, Obama entered office in 2009 promising to turn over a new leaf with Iran.By promising to turn over a new leaf in US-Iran relations, Obama signaled his belief that the sorry state of those relations was America’s fault. Because if it wasn’t America’s fault, then no American president could change the situation.Obama’s assumption was entirely wrong.
The Iranian regime declared war on the US shortly after it seized power. Months later, the regime’s shock troops stormed the US embassy in Tehran and held US diplomats hostage for 444 days.Despite an uninterrupted record of Iranian aggression, since 1979 every US administration tried to convince the ayatollahs to abandon their hostility to America. Iran pocketed every presidential concession and redoubled its hostile actions against America and its allies and interests.Ignoring the record, Obama argued he had the Midas touch. Obama made his case for uniqueness to Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood in his speech at Cairo University in June 2009.There Obama legitimized Iran’s grievances against the US. He invited Iran’s leaders and their Sunni jihadist counterparts in the Muslim Brotherhood to work with him.At the same time, he attacked Israel and the US’s Sunni Muslim allies.By attacking the US’s allies and embracing its enemies, Obama signaled Iranians and the Muslim Brotherhood that he was interested in a strategic realignment of America’s Middle East posture.In its editorial following Obama’s speech, the Times’ editors gushed, “After eight years of [American] arrogance and bullying that has turned even close friends against the United States, it takes a strong president to acknowledge the mistakes of the past.”IN THE months and years that followed his Cairo speech, Obama’s primary goal in the Middle East was to persuade Iran’s regime to reach a nuclear accord with him. Although Obama and his advisers insisted that his nuclear diplomacy didn’t affect their willingness to confront and punish Iran for its other rogue behavior, their actions showed the opposite was true.From his earliest days in office, Obama turned a blind eye to all of Iran’s bad behavior.For instance, just days after his Cairo speech, the regime stole the presidential elections. Then Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was declared the winner of the poll against his two chief opponents Mir Hossain Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi. The public, which came out in the millions for Mousavi and Karroubi, rejected the official results. Millions took to the streets in what became known as the Green Revolution.Instead of standing with the Iranians in the streets demanding freedom, Obama stood on the sidelines and so effectively sided with the anti-American regime against the Iranian people begging for American support.In his report, Meyer showed another casualty of Obama’s obsessive desire to reach a nuclear accord with Tehran. Meyer chronicled the shocking fate of Project Cassandra, a multi-year investigation led by the US’s Drug Enforcement Agency. The DEA probe involved 30 US and foreign law enforcement and intelligence agencies. It was directed against Hezbollah’s worldwide narco-terrorist empire, which netted Iran’s foreign legion up to $1 billion annually.Project Cassandra investigators “followed cocaine shipments, some from Latin America to West Africa and on to Europe and the Middle East, and others through Venezuela and Mexico to the United States. They tracked the river of dirty cash as it was laundered by, among other tactics, buying American used cars and shipping them to Africa. And with the help of some key cooperating witnesses, the agents traced the conspiracy, they believed, to the innermost circle of Hezbollah and its state sponsors in Iran.”Rather than support the investigation, which showed that Hezbollah was importing thousands of tons of cocaine to the US and using US used car dealerships to launder their drug money, the Obama administration quashed it.“As Project Cassandra reached higher into the hierarchy of the conspiracy, Obama administration officials threw an increasingly insurmountable series of roadblocks in its way.... When Project Cassandra leaders sought approval for some significant investigations, prosecutions, arrests and financial sanctions, officials at the Justice and Treasury departments delayed, hindered or rejected their requests.”Meyer reports that Hezbollah used its drug profits to supply Syrian President Bashar Assad with chemical and conventional weapons he used against his own people. It used its drug money to provide tank-destroying roadside bombs to Iranian-controlled Shi’ite militias in Iraq which killed hundreds of US soldiers. It used its drug money to build apartment blocks in south Lebanon which, as the IDF has documented, double as missile launch pads and storage facilities in preparation for its next war against Israel.And it used the money to turn a slew of Latin American countries into US enemies and Iranian allies in Tehran’s war to destroy America.As Obama Treasury Department official Katherine Bauer claimed in written testimony before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs last February, “under the Obama administration... these [Hezbollah-related] investigations were tamped down for fear of rocking the boat with Iran and jeopardizing the nuclear deal.”THIS THEN brings us back to Haley at the UN on Monday, and the US liberal media’s condemnation of her defense of Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.In November 2015, the UN Security Council unanimously approved Obama’s nuclear deal. The resolution was submitted by Obama’s UN ambassador Samantha Power.The EU, the Russians and the Chinese all happily partnered with the Obama administration in concluding a nuclear deal. That vaunted, unanimously supported deal paved the way for Iran to become a nuclear armed state within a decade.The international community – along with the US liberal media – cheered as Obama attacked Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu for daring to warn of the consequences of his nuclear pact.At the same time, the international community, the Times and its liberal media counterparts all hid the news of Hezbollah’s narco-terrorism empire and its responsibility for thousands of cocaine-related deaths each year in America. Indeed, as of Tuesday, neither the Times’ nor The Washington Post’s websites mentioned Meyer’s report.In her statement Monday, Haley said, “This is the first time I have exercised the American right to veto a resolution in the Security Council. The exercise of the veto is not something the United States does often.... We do it with no joy, but we do it with no reluctance.”She added, “The fact that this veto is being done in defense of American sovereignty and in defense of America’s role in the Middle East peace process is not a source of embarrassment for us; it should be an embarrassment to the remainder of the Security Council.”And it should be an embarrassment to the New York Times and its colleagues that they have refused to report why Haley and Trump are demonstrably right to stand alone and why Obama was catastrophically wrong to believe that the US should stand with the “international community” against itself.
