United Liberty

From NPR:

President Obama marked the 94th remembrance day for the deaths of an estimated 1.5 million Armenians at the hands of the Turks during World War I. As a candidate, Obama called the killings genocide. On a trip to Turkey as president last month, he shied away from that description.

This may not seem like much, but it is a ballsy move on the part of President Obama to call what happened an “atrocity.” However, it’s not ballsy enough. Why is Obama unwilling to use the g-word now that he is president, while, as a senator, he called for President Bush to recognize Turkey’s crimes by sponsoring the Armenian Genocide Resolution?

I’d like to echo the comments of my fellow contributors here at United Liberty in a call for a non-interventionist foreign policy on the part of the United States when it comes to the situation in Gaza. This conflict is complicated and poses no real threat to our national security. The U.S. should discontinue its foreign aid to Israel as well as Egypt, Jordan and all other countries receiving the largesse of the American taxpayer.

Independent of any opinion regarding who is “right” and who is “wrong” in this conflict (I think there is plenty of blame to go around on both sides), I do have to stand up and give Israel a small moment of applause for standing up to the United Nations. Israel is a sovereign nation and has the right to make its own military decisions. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert recently reacted to the UN Security Council’s recent resolution on the situation in Gaza:

By now, everyone is aware that Hamas has attacked Israel, though it was Israel itself which broke the ceasefire. I no longer have a television but I know the story is plastered on every major news network because it is also plastered on every political blog and social networking site. There is an entire network of supporters on both sides of the conflict insisting that their side is blameless and that the concerns of the other side are unremarkable. Both sides are spewing enough hyperbole and anger to warrant concern about fistfights breaking out stateside.

The conflict between Israel and it’s “neighbors” in Gaza and the West Bank is a great big mess that apparently has just one solution - according to a large group of foreign policy geniuses in America and Israel: more fighting.

The recent Israeli military incursion into Gaza has been correctly termed an “invasion”, as put by Congressman Ron Paul. It shows the world, once again, that the policy of preemptive or “preventive” war carries the day with Israel and its policies towards its neighbors. In reality, this is an extension of the U.S. foreign policy of intervention into the internal affairs of other nations, having taken its latest form in the past five years as preemptive war with the U.S. occupation of Iraq. Many staunch (i.e., blind) supporters of the state of Israel somehow believe that the latest military strategy will somehow work in staving off the threats of rockets being fired by members and supporters of Hamas.

Back in 2004, when I was coming of age politically, I strongly sympathized with the Palestinian cause. I’ve always found the forced removal of Palestinians from their homes during the creation of the state of Israel to be a mistake of modern society, and I find it blaringly obvious that the black-haired and brown skinned refugees in the West Bank have a more rooted history with the Middle East than the brown-haired and white skinned Jewish college students from Seattle and New York who go to Israel to find themselves.

My support for Palestinians dissipated, however, as I became more aware of the horrors of modern Islamism. The Palestinian people have voted Islamists into power through Hamas. Peace has never been on the Islamist agenda and so peace is not what the Palestinians have gotten.