Wednesday, March 24, 2010 – Jim Hanson, Mike Rinn, Bill Federer

MONOLOGUE – March 24, 2010

Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, was in Washington this past week and made a very firm statement in direct response to some of the intense pressure he’s been under from the Obama administration to curtail construction of housing for Jewish citizens of the state of Israel in their capital city, specifically the part of the city known as the ‘Old City’ or East Jerusalem.
And here’s what Prime Minister Netanyahu had to say on the matter in remarks delivered to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a huge conference that they had over the weekend and Monday to a packed house, including a great many senior and other members of the United States Congress and government, “The Jewish people were building Jerusalem 3000 years ago and the Jewish people are building Jerusalem today…Jerusalem is not a settlement, it’s our capital.”

Well that said it rather nicely, clearly a very popular applause line in the packed crowd, but a statement of fact and one that the Obama administration seems both indifferent to, in terms of its factual character and worse, intent on changing. However, it has to, using whatever means, including, we are told, through reporting that has been coming from members of the press corps who have been briefed by government officials, a not too subtle message here, the Obama administration is prepared to try to bring down Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, that is to say interfere directly in the internal affairs of a friendly nation, a sovereign, democratic nation that has elected Prime Minister Netanyahu to run the country.
And you know what this reminds me of more than anything else, the kind of pressure that is being put on the Israelis right now? And God love them, they’re standing up to it rather well, in fact we have a report that an additional 20 units have just been approved by Benjamin Netanyahu’s government in Jerusalem. But this reminds of nothing so much as the treatment that another democratic nation, a strategically vital nation, received at the hands of not one but two of its most important allies at critical moment in history. I’m talking about the country that was then known as Czechoslovakia in 1939, when the British and the French governments decided that they would accede to Adolph Hitler’s demands for concessions at the expense of Czechoslovakia and effectively compelled their ally, the people of Czechoslovakia, into making both territorial and political and what ultimately proved to be deadly serious strategic concessions. The Sudetenland, the defenses of the western front of Czechoslovakia, the armaments industry of Czechoslovakia all fell into Adolph Hitler’s hands as a result of the demands placed on Czechs by their allies in Britain and France. And the rest, folks, as they say is history, and it didn’t turn out very well. Some 60 million people lost their lives by some estimates in the war that ensued.
We are at the cusp I fear, at the hands of an Obama administration that is at best inept, simply incompetent, and at worst malevolent when it comes to Israel, now demanding that Israel make political and territorial and strategic concessions that may prove perhaps as consequential as those of 1939 in Europe. Needless to say, I pray not, but we take these sorts of steps, undermining a friendly, an ally, a strategically vital partner, at our peril, not just the peril of some people who as Neville Chamberlain once said “a distant country of which we know little.” Well that’s not true of Israel, it’s a distant country yes, but we know a great deal about it, we know what its people have been subjected to, not just during the Holocaust, which was the principal feature of course of Adolf Hitler’s terrors, but what has happened in successive wars when Israel’s Arab neighbors tried to destroy the Jewish State.

We dare not let this happen again, and yet I fear that’s what we’re risking by this kind of behavior on the part of the United States government. So I hope you’ll join us here at Secure Freedom Radio in standing up against it, Never Again must remain our watchword. And I hope by lending your voice to that effort, we will prevail.