| This weekend we received the unpleasant news about the sale of Al Gore's Current TV, on Dec. 31, just under the tax deadline, for many millions of dollars, to the Al-Queda, Hamas news organ, Al-Jazeera. We have three Al's in a row here. Is anyone surprised? Dismayed, yes, but surprised? (By the way - we have a strong recommendation from an AFSI member who encourages viewers to watch JLTV and subscribe to: www.tin.tv.) If some are surprised, consider the invasion of the Muslim Brotherhood in the Obama White House. Does that surprise us? See Frank Gaffney, Steve Emerson, Brigitte Gabriel on this subject for graphic details. And now we have confirmed that the "in-your-face" nomination of Chuck Hagel for Secretary of Defense is going forward, as well as the John Kerry nomination for Secretary of State. Again, no surprises. Don't say we didn't warn you. See below and CALL YOUR REPRESENTATIVES ASAP REQUESTING THAT THEY SAY NO TO THE NOMINATIONS OF KERRY & HAGEL, BAD FOR BOTH AMERICA AND ISRAEL: 202-224-3121. Where does U.S. Sen. John Kerry (D-MA), stand on foreign policy matters pertaining to Israel and the Middle East? Below are the highlights of 10 letters signed by large majorities of the U.S. Senate, noting whether Kerry signed or not. Letters and signatories obtained from the archives of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.
CONTACT YOUR CONGRESSMAN CONTACT YOUR SENATOR
http://www.algemeiner.com/2012/12/31/john-kerrys-record-on-israel%E2%80%94in-letters/
DECEMBER 2012
Letter: Urging further pressure on Iran and asking President Obama to reiterate his readiness to exercise a military option if necessary
Number of signatories: 74
Kerry: Did not sign
SEPTEMBER 2012
Letter: Urging the European Union to designate Hezbollah as a terrorist organization
Number of signatories: 75
Kerry: Did not sign
JUNE 2012
Letter: Supporting Israel's right to self-defense and affirming that Israel's naval blockade is legal following the Gaza flotilla incident
Number of signatories: 87
Kerry: Did not sign
APRIL 2010
Letter: Stressing the need for "direct, face-to-face negotiations without preconditions on either side" for Israelis and Palestinians and affirming the "unbreakable bonds that tie the United States and Israel together"
Number of signatories: 87
Kerry: Did not sign
APRIL 2010
Letter: Calling for crippling sanctions against Iran
Number of signatories: 81
Kerry: Did not sign
NOVEMBER 2009
Letter: Supporting a strong international affairs budget for fiscal year 2010, including security assistance for Israel
Number of signatories: 58
Kerry: Signed and initiated
AUGUST 2009
Letter: Supporting President Obama's effort to encourage Arab states to normalize relations with Israel
Signatories: 71
Kerry: Did not sign
MAY 2009
Letter: "Peace Principles" letter stating that "every effort should be made" to realize peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors, and insisting on "absolute Palestinian commitment to ending terrorist violence and to building the institutions necessary for a viable Palestinian state living side-by-side, in peace with the Jewish state of Israel"
Number of signatories: 76
Kerry: Signed
JUNE 2008
Letter: Reiterating Israel's right to self-defense, calling on the U.S. to stand strongly with Israel at the UN, and urging pressure on Arab states to do more to support Israeli-Palestinian talks
Number of signatories: 77
Kerry: Signed
MARCH 2007
Letter: Request for "no direct aid and no contacts with any members of a Palestinian Authority that does not explicitly and unequivocally recognize Israel's right to exist, renounce terror, and accept previous agreements"
Number of signatories: 79
Kerry: Did not sign
JUNE 2005
Letter: Expressing support for Israel's disengagement plan from Gaza, calling disengagement a chance for Palestinian leadership "to prove to the world and, more importantly, its own people, that it is capable of governing"
Number of signatories: 73
Kerry: Signed
DEC 2005
Not content to smear only the Commander-in-Chief, Senator Kerry also accused U.S. servicemen of "terrorizing" the Iraqi people. On December 4, 2005, he told Bob Schieffer on Face the Nation: "And there is no reason, Bob, that young American soldiers need to be going into the homes of Iraqis in the dead of night, terrorizing kids and children, you know, women ."
In recent years, as columnist Arnold Ahlert has so aptly written, Kerry "has been the federal government's highest-ranking apologist for Syrian President Bashar Assad." Indeed it was Kerry who repeatedly tried to undermine the Bush administration's efforts to isolate the dictator. Under Obama, Kerry has pursued with renewed vigor his impulse to engage Assad. During a January 2009 visit to Damascus, for instance, the Senatorlistened attentively to Assad's admonition that Washington must "move away from a policy based on dictating decisions" to Syria. Kerry, in turn, said: "Unlike the Bush administration that believed you could simply tell people what to do and walk away and wait for them to do it, we believe you have to engage in a discussion." In April 2010, Kerry again met with Assad and called Syria "an essential player in bringing peace and stability to the region."
Forty-thousand dead bodies later, one tries vainly to reconcile John Kerry's track record with President Obama's glowing description of him as the "perfect choice" for Secretary of State. One can only ponder with trepidation what dark days lay ahead for America with this hate-America veteran taking the reins at the State Department.
KERRY'S VIETNAM DAYS
From sailors that served honorably on the coast and rivers of Nam with John Kerry who have no respect for him at all. They said John arrived at Cam Ranh Bay and told people he was going to follow in JFK's footsteps, his hero, and win the Navy Cross and be president someday. He only served on a Swift boat three months and put himself in for three Purple Hearts and never spent one day in a hospital. This is a disgrace to the men that were WIA and deserved the award.
After being discharged from the Navy in early 1970, Kerry joined Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) and became a major figure in the so-called "peace" movement, whose hallmarks were a deep wellspring of hatred for the United States coupled with sympathy for America's Communist enemy. In May 1970, Kerry, without government authorization, met personally with North Vietnamese and Viet Cong delegations in Paris to discuss a list of "peace" proposals enumerated by Nguyen Thi Madame Binh, the top Viet Cong delegate to the Paris Peace talks. In the aftermath of that illegal meeting, Kerry strongly advised the U.S. Senate to accept Binh's proposals.
At that time, Kerry himself acknowledged that his visit to Paris was "on the borderline" of legality. Actually, it extended far beyond that "borderline." A federal law known as the Uniform Code of Military Justice prescribed severe punishment (including, in some cases, the death penalty) for any person who "without proper authority, knowingly harbors or protects or gives intelligence to or communicates or corresponds with or holds any intercourse with the enemy, either directly or indirectly."
During the ensuing months, Kerry, with increasing stridency, continued to exhort the U.S. to accept the Viet Cong peace proposals. His radical VVAW comrades went so far as to sign a "People's Peace Treaty," whose nine points were all extracted from a list of Viet Cong conditions for ending the war. Kerry fully supportedthis treaty.
On April 22, 1971, Kerry famously testified to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations that many U.S. servicemen in Vietnam had "personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war ." "We learned the meaning of free fire zones," added Kerry. "Shooting anything that moves, and we watched while America placed a cheapness on the lives of Orientals." Moreover, Kerry emphasized that America's "war crimes" in Southeast Asia were "not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command."
Army reports that were unearthed decades later resoundingly discredited the claims of Kerry and his fellow VVAW members, proving those claims to be essentially a pack of lies. When Kerry was running for U.S. President in 2004, the publication U.S. Veteran Dispatch noted that Kerry's 1971 Senate testimony had "occurred while some of his fellow Vietnam veterans were known by the world to be enduring terrible suffering as prisoners of war in North Vietnamese prisons." Similarly, retired General George S. Patton IIIcharged that Kerry's actions had given "aid and comfort to the enemy." And the organization Vietnam Veterans Against John Kerry stated:
"As a national leader of VVAW, Kerry campaigned against the effort of the United States to contain the spread of Communism. He used the blood of servicemen still in the field for his own political advancement by claiming that their blood was being shed unnecessarily or in vain.. Under Kerry's leadership, VVAW members mocked the uniform of United States soldiers by wearing tattered fatigues marked with pro-communist graffiti. They dishonored America by marching in demonstrations under the flag of the Viet Cong enemy."
Yet today, this same John Kerry has been nominated to serve as Secretary of State for the same nation he trashed so relentlessly in the '70s. Only in America.
After graduating law school, working in a district attorney's office, and serving a brief stint as Massachusetts' lieutenant governor, Kerry was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1984. Just a few months later-on April 18, 1985-Kerry and fellow Democratic Senator Tom Harkin traveled to Nicaragua to meet with President Daniel Ortega, whose Communist Sandinista government had strong ties to the Soviet Union and Cuba. Through Kerry and Harkin, President Ortega offered a cease-fire agreement on the condition that the Reagan Administration stop aiding the rebel Contras who were then at war with the Sandinistas. Reagan rejected the offer as a transparent "propaganda initiative" designed to influence an upcoming House vote on a $14 million Contra-aid package, but Kerry said: "I am willing . to take the risk in the effort to put to test the good faith of the Sandinistas." The House of Representatives ultimately voted against the Contra aid. The following day, Ortega flew to Moscow to accept a $200 million loan from the Soviets. Presumably this was one of the many "major foreign policy debates" in which, by President Obama's reckoning, Kerry had so impressively distinguished himself.
Unchastened by the evidence of his own poor judgment, Kerry in 1986 supported a "fast for life" initiative by four U.S. military veterans protesting President Reagan's "illegal and extraordinarily vicious wars against the poor of Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala." Also in the 1980s, Senator Kerry hired Gareth Porter, a former fellow of the consistently pro-Soviet Institute for Policy Studies, as a legislative aide. And in 2002, Kerry sent his warm greetings to a major gathering of the Democratic Socialists of America's Boston chapter.
Kerry's next opportunity to distinguish himself as a man of exceedingly poor character was furnished by the conflict in Iraq. Initially, Kerry voted to authorize the use of military force against Saddam Hussein, a position the Senator based on his firm conviction-which he publicly articulated on numerous occasions-that Saddam was aggressively seeking to develop weapons of mass destruction. During the weeks and months leading up to the March 2003 U.S. invasion, for example, Kerry made the following statements:
* "It would be naive to the point of great danger not to believe that, left to his own devices, Saddam Hussein will misjudge, provoke and stumble into a future, more dangerous confrontation with the civilized world. He has as much as promised it."
* "If Saddam Hussein is unwilling to bend to the international community's already existing order, then he will have invited enforcement ."
* "Without question we need to disarm Saddam Hussein. He is a brutal and murderous dictator, leading an oppressive regime. And we all know the litany of his offenses."
* "People have forgotten that for seven and a half years, we found weapons of mass destruction [in Iraq]. We were destroying weapons of mass destruction."
But as the political winds shifted, Kerry and his fellow congressional Democrats began to portray, with ever-growing frequency, the Iraq War as a foreign-policy debacle that had been launched hastily and without justifiable cause.
FOR THE LOVE OF AMERICA KERRY IS AN EMBARASSMENT
KERRY'S LIST OF SHAME MUST SINK HIS SELECTION FOR SECRETARY OF STATE.
>Early 1970, Kerry joined Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW)
> May 1970, Kerry, without government authorization, met personally (illegally) with North Vietnamese and Viet Cong delegations in Paris to discuss a list of "peace" proposals; violating the Uniform Code of Military Justice
>April 22, 1971, Kerry famously testified to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations that many U.S. servicemen in Vietnam had "personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war ."
> As a national leader of VVAW, Kerry campaigned against the effort of the United States to contain the spread of Communism.
>1984. Kerry was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1984. Just a few months later-on April 18, 1985-Kerry and fellow Democratic Senator Tom Harkin traveled to Nicaragua to meet with President Daniel Ortega, whose Communist Sandinista government had strong ties to the Soviet Union and Cuba.
>1986. supported a "fast for life" initiative by four U.S. military veterans protesting President Reagan's "illegal and extraordinarily vicious wars against the poor of Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala."Also
>In the1980s. Senator Kerry hired Gareth Porter, a former fellow of the consistently pro-SovietInstitute for Policy Studies, as a legislative aide.
>2002, Kerry sent his warm greetings to a major gathering of the Democratic Socialists of America's Boston chapter.
>pre-2003. Kerry said, Saddam was aggressively seeking to develop weapons of mass destruction.
>pre-2003 Kerry said, people have forgotten that for seven and a half years, we found weapons of mass destruction [in Iraq]. We were destroying weapons of mass destruction.
>2004, Kerry charged that President Bush had not only "misled the American people" about the threat posed by Saddam, but also had "arbitrarily" decided that the "time for diplomacy is over" and "rushed our nation to war."
>December 4, 2005. Kerry told Bob Schieffer on Face the Nation: "And there is no reason, Bob, that young American soldiers need to be going into the homes of Iraqis in the dead of night, terrorizing kids and children, you know, women ."
FOR THE LOVE OF ISRAEL & AMERICA- WRITE or Call YOUR CONGRESSIONAL REPRESENTATIVE TO VOTE AGAINST CHUCK HAGEL CONTACT YOUR CONGRESSMAN CONTACT YOUR SENATOR
CHUCK HAGEL IS JUST AGAINST ISRAEL ON KEY FOREIGN POLICY ISSUES!!! Chuck Hagel is arguably the most hostile anti-Israel senator ever to serve in the U.S. Senate. His record features a laundry list of anti-Israel actions that include his failure to sign a bipartisan letter to the European Union to add Hezbollah to its list of terrorist organizations. He was one of only a handful of Senators who refused to sign the letter. Chuck Hagel currently serves as Chairman of the Atlantic Council, a foreign policy blog. On December 11, 2012 the Atlantic Council published a front page article titled "Israel's Apartheid Policy."
- Caroline Glick writes: "In Hagel, he chose someone even more outspoken in his animus towards the Jewish state than Obama.
- Nebraska Jews Recall Senator Chuck Hagel as "Unfriendly" and "Unmovable" on Israel, "Didn't Give a Damn About the Jewish Community"
- Hagel had recently appeared before an Arab group, where he'd boasted that his support for Israel wasn't "automatic."
- 2008, Mr. Hagel and John Kerry co-authored an op-ed in this newspaper titled "It's Time to Talk to Syria"
- In 2006, Mr. Hagel described Israel's war against Hezbollah as "the systematic destruction of an American friend, the country and people of Lebanon."
- "Hagel was one of only four senators who refused to sign a letter expressing support for Israel during the second Palestinian intifada"
- In 2002, a year in which 457 Israelis were killed in terrorist attacks (a figure proportionately equivalent to more than 20,000 fatalities in the U.S., or seven 9/11s), Mr. Hagel weighed in with the advice that "Israel must take steps to show its commitment to peace." This was two years after Yasser Arafat had been offered a state by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak at Camp David.
- Hagel was one of only two U.S. senators who voted against renewing the Iran-Libya Sanctions Act
- Hagel didn't sign all of those nonbinding letters from the AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee), justifiably calling them "stupid."
- He voted for the Iran Nonproliferation Act
- Hagel wants a weaker stance than most other senators against the terrorists in
Iran and Syria and the West Bank and Gaza and against those who help the terrorists."
- In 2001, when 87 members of the Senate sent President Bush a letter saying Yasser Arafat should not be invited to meet with high-level officials in Washington and faulting the Palestinian Arabs for using violence against Israel, Hagel were among those who failed to sign.
- Hagel had met at Damascus in 1998 "with the terror-sponsoring dictator, Hafez Al-Assad, and returned to tell a reporter about the meeting, "Peace comes through dealing with people. Peace doesn't come at the end of a bayonet or the end of a gun."
+ He co-sponsored resolutions opposing any unilateral declaration of a Palestinian state and praising Israel's efforts "in the face of terrorism, hostility and belligerence by many of her neighbors."
+ He also co-sponsored legislation urging the international community "to avoid contact with and refrain from supporting the terrorist organization Hamas until it agrees to recognize Israel, renounce violence, disarm and accept prior agreements."
What we're seeing as Obama floats the name of Senator Hagel for secretary of defense is a glimpse of his true views on the Jewish state.
"Be at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors, and let every new year find you a better man."
Benjamin Franklin
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