Argentinian president visits Israel, will move embassy to Jerusalem

Argentinian president Javier Milei, an impressive supporting of Israel, has paid a visit with plenty of good things to tell:

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met on Wednesday at his office in Jerusalem with Argentine President Javier Milei, who has promised to move his country’s embassy to the capital and designate Hamas a terrorist group.

“I’m delighted to welcome you, President Milei, and your delegation, to Israel. You’re a great friend of the Jewish state. We are delighted with your decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and move your diplomatic post there, and also, of course, an embassy,” began Netanyahu.

“We share the desire for prosperity, security and peace. We know that the greatest challenge to peace in our area, but also in yours, is Iran. And we appreciate the cooperation that we are doing with you in security and diplomacy.

“Your stalwart support for Israel in so many forms is deeply, deeply appreciated. Welcome to Jerusalem. Welcome, friend,” added the premier.

Israeli President Isaac Herzog hosted Milei at his official residence on Tuesday evening and presented him with a Hebrew Bible in appreciation of his firm support for the State of Israel and the Jewish people.

“The people of Israel have immense warmth and friendship with Argentina, and your visit here exemplifies the unique relationship that we have with Argentina, and the fact that we have so many Israelis whose family originated from Argentina,” said Herzog.

“You have shown your love and affection, both for the Jewish people and the nation-state of the Jewish people, the State of Israel, and we thank you wholeheartedly for this,” he added.

Said Milei: “I have been committed since day one to making sure that my first diplomatic visit as president would be to the State of Israel. Here I am, keeping my promise now.”

Milei also visited Yad Vashem, and certainly has proven an excellent example of a leader. And, he's also paid a visit to Nir Oz, the kibbutz that was hardest hit by the Hamas bloodbath on October 7, 2023:

President Javier Milei of Argentina expressed his solidarity with Israel against Hamas terror Thursday, as he toured the ruins of Kibbutz Nir Oz with President Isaac Herzog of Israel.

Milei visited the burned-out homes and bloodstained bedrooms of Nir Oz, one of the hardest-hit communities attacked by Hamas on October 7, where a quarter of the residents were either murdered or kidnapped. Several of the victims were Argentinian.

Milei met survivors from the community, including Ophelia Roitman, 77, who was abducted and later released in a hostage deal. Roitman had been a teacher at a Jewish school in Argentina before immigrating to Israel.

He also paid a special visit to the home of the Bibas family, who are Argentinian-Israeli. They were kidnapped on October 7, including one-year-old Kfir Bibas, the youngest hostage, who recently is thought to have celebrated his first birthday, in captivity.

Irit Lahav, one of the survivors of the attack on the kibbutz, who accompanied Milei during his visit, told Breitbart News that he had cried at several stops along the way, deeply moved by what he had seen.

Later, after walking throughout the community for nearly two hours, Milei addressed journalists.

With explosions resounding in the background from ongoing battles in Gaza nearby, the Argentinian president shared his deep feelings of sorrow at seeing the devastation around him — as well as his commitment to supporting Israel, and the cause of freedom in general.

Milei said that the terror attack represented pure antisemitism similar to the Nazis, and that the free world had to stand against it.

Milei's done the right thing to visit the sites of the tragedy, and we must hope he can help improve the sad situation the world's now fallen into.

WE NEED TO BOOST OUR MORALE

There is a lot of doom and gloom these days as we read the news.

Surely, the world is in a mess!

But we must step up to the plate and restore American optimism (hat tip to The Conservative Lady):

Top 5 Reasons Democrats Are Scared S***less of Allen West

5. Because he destroys the extremist myth: West and the 37 other black Republicans running for national office destroy the liberal myth that the Tea Party movement is somehow racist and extremist. Hint: it's neither.

4. Because he kicks liberal ass (metaphorically speaking, of course). Like challenging Barack Obama to a debate.

3. Because he's a Constitutionalist: "The Constitution says 'promote the general welfare', not provide welfare!"

2. Because he knows the stakes: "...when you listen to that fife and drum, it hearkens me back to how this country got started. When you think about how patriots got together in taverns, when patriots got together in houses along rivers and creeks, when you think how the U.S. Marine Corps got started in a place called Tun Tavern, this is where we are right now in our country. We need to meet... and talk about restoring our liberty and fighting back against a tyrannical government."

1. Because he's got presidential mettle. He's a leader. A war hero. A Constitutionalist. He's the vanguard of a new conservative black Republican movement, possibly the first since Reconstruction. But now he needs to win his Congressional election.

Help him out. The fife and drum are sounding in the distance. You don't have to go to war, you just have to muster your support and your vote.



 
 
Cross-posted at: Doug Ross @ Journal.

TWO IMPORTANT SPEECHES

First, Melanie Phillips points to a speech posted at Family Security Matters written by Newt Gingrich, that he gave at a JNF meeting at the Selig Center in which he really nailed what's wrong with today's politicians:

And let's be honest: What's the primary source of money for al Qaeda? It's you, re-circulated through Saudi Arabia. Because we have no national energy strategy, when clearly if you really cared about liberating the United States from the Middle East and if you really cared about the survival of Israel, one of your highest goals would be to move to a hydrogen economy and to eliminate petroleum as a primary source of energy.Now that's what a serious national strategy would look like, but that would require real change.

So then you look at Saudi Arabia. The fact that we tolerate a country saying no Christian and no Jew can go to Mecca, and we start with the presumption that that's true while they attack Israel for being a religious state is a sign of our timidity, our confusion, our cowardice that is stunning. It's not complicated. We're inviting Saudi Arabia to come to Annapolis to talk about rights for Palestinians when nobody is saying, ‘Let's talk about rights for Christians and Jews in Saudi Arabia. Let's talk about rights for women in Saudi Arabia.’

So we accept this totally one-sided definition of the world in which our enemies can cheerfully lie on television every day, and we don't even have the nerve to insist on the truth. We pretend their lies are reasonable. This is a very fundamental problem. And if you look at who some of the largest owners of some of our largest banks are today, they're Saudis.

You keep pumping billions of dollars a year into countries like Venezuela, Iran and Saudi Arabia, and Russia, and you are presently going to have created people who oppose you who have lots of money. And they're then going to come back to your own country and finance, for example, Arab study institutes whose only requirement is that they never tell the truth. So you have all sorts of Ph.D.s who now show up quite cheerfully prepared to say whatever it is that makes their funders happy – in the name, of course, of academic freedom. So why wouldn't Columbia host a genocidal madman? It's just part of political correctness. I mean, Ahmadinejad may say terrible things, he may lock up students, he may kill journalists, he may say, ‘We should wipe out Israel,’ he may say, ‘We should defeat the United States,’ but after all, what has he done that's inappropriate? What has he done that wouldn't be repeated at a Hollywood cocktail party or a nice gathering in Europe?...

What truly bothers me is the shallowness and the sophistry of the Western governments, starting with our own. When a person says to you, ‘I don't recognize that you exist,’ you don't start a negotiation. The person says, ‘I literally do not recognize’ and then lies to you. I mean the first thing you say to this guy is ‘Terrific. Let's go visit Mecca. Since clearly there's no other state except Israel that is based on religion, the fact that I happen to be Christian won't bother anybody.’ And then he'll say, ‘Well, that's different.’

We tolerate this. We have created our own nightmare because we refuse to tell the truth…None of our enemies are confused. Our enemies don't get up each morning and go, ‘Oh, gosh, I think I'll have an existential crisis of identity in which I will try to think through whether or not we can be friends while you're killing me.’ Our enemies get up every morning and say, ‘We hate the West. We hate freedom.

Gingrich makes a lot of good points about how it is the government itself that is making itself into modern-day Chamberlains and not willing to be truthful about the enemies of the west. Read the whole thing.

Next we have one given by Benjamin Netanyahu at the Knesset last week, in which he points out that we do not condition our existence on the enemies' agreement:

The UN resolution of November 29, 1947 recognizing a Jewish state was an important moment in the history of our nation, and an important moment in the history of all nations.

Since then, we have made peace with Egypt and Jordan, but the obstacle to widening the circle of peace remains what it has always been: the refusal of Israel's enemies to recognize the Jewish State in any borders.

Our enemies do not want an Arab state next to Israel. They want an Arab state instead of Israel.

Time and again they were offered an Arab state next to Israel: first, in the partition plan of 1947; then, indirectly, in the Oslo accords; later, unequivocally, at Camp David in 2000; and finally, in the countless declarations since then by both Israeli and international leaders which have called for two states for two peoples.

And how did our enemies respond to these offers? Time and again they violently rejected them. In 1947, they launched terror attacks and then an all out war to annihilate the Jewish state.

During the Oslo peace process, they terrorized Israel with suicide bombers; after Camp David, they orchestrated the Second Intifadah in which over 1,000 Israelis were murdered; since then they have fired thousands of Katushya rockets on the Galilee and thousands of Kassam rockets on the Western Negev in order, they say, "to liberate occupied Palestine" -- in other words, "occupied" Haifa, "occupied" Acre, "occupied" Sderot and "occupied" Ashkelon.

There's more to read of this too at the link.

Panic In Iran

I have a long post about what the recent Israeli attack on Syria portends for Iran.


The short version: if America and/or Israel is going to attack Iran the attack will probably happen in the next two months or so.

The Call

H/T Something... and Half of Something

Cross Posted at Classical Values

America Fights The Jihadis 1776 - 2007

Michael Totten has a fascinating interview up with historian Michael Oren.

PORTLAND, OREGON – Renowned American-Israeli historian and best-selling author Michael Oren is touring the United States promoting his new book Power, Faith, and Fantasy a sweeping history of America’s involvement in the Middle East from 1776 to the present. It’s the first and only book on the subject ever written, and it’s currently inching toward the top of the New York Times best-seller list for non-fiction.

I first met Michael Oren under Katyusha rocket fire when he worked as a Spokesman for the IDF Northern Command in Israel during last summer’s war against Hezbollah, and I met him again when he came to my home town of Portland, Oregon, last week on his book tour.

You can read Michael Totten's war time interview with Michael Oren from last summer here. Michael has a new interview of Oren.

“You cannot withdraw from Iraq and be confident that the enemy is not going to follow you. Because the enemy is going to follow you. America can’t detach from the Middle East because the Middle East is not going to detach from America. And America’s going to have to learn to fight this fight to win in a much more prudent and effective way. And there are ways America can fight it more effectively.” — Michael Oren

I wish some one would tell that to Harry Reid and the cut and run Democrats.

Cross Posted at Power and Control and at Classical Values

AMERICANS ARE THE MOST GENEROUS PEOPLE ON EARTH

Americans give twice as much as the next most charitable country, according to a November 2006 comparison done by the Charities Aid Foundation.

PLUS the USA liberated and/or protected a billion people from totalitarianism.

With our treasure and blood.

Which is why anti-Americans can kiss my freakin' ass.

Genocide Question

America left South Vietnam to its own devices in 1975, leading to 2 1/2 million deaths and totolitarian governments in Cambodia and Vietnam.

So I assume the anti-war mantra now is: if it turns out no worse than 'Nam every thing will be fine.

Also note that in '75 all the South was asking for was material support and airstrikes against the invading North.

The anti-war folks who constantly scream about genocide now want to enable another one.

OK.

So the question is: if our leaving initiates a genocide in Iraq should we go back to save the people we once promised to protect?

Cross Posted at Power and Control and at Classical Values

War For Profit

I was reading a thread at the Netscape blog about why and how Iraq is lost. It made me clarify some of my ideas from an earlier post.

One commenter put forth the notion that wars are in fact diplomacy by other means and that the object is to gain a post war commercial advantage. When you are in such a war, profit and loss calculations are certainly in order. Our war with the USSR certainly was of that nature. The Soviets promised a chicken in every pot. America promised two (our poor people have a fat problem if that is any indication).

So the question again is: when is it wise to shake hands and make up and when must one fight on despite losses and adversity? It all depends on the enemy you fight. Do they want a chicken in every pot or Valhalla?

The Valhalla types require harsher treatment, because they will not respond to profit and loss except in extremity.

Eric at Classical Values has some thoughts. The Belmont Club post on the Three Conjectures is also apt.

Here is my position on Iraq:

In Iraq our enemies are stalemated just as much as we are. We only have to fight one day more than they do. However long that takes.

For those who need a little inspiration in these troubled times I can do no better than quote Winston Churchill extensively Which I do here. (also linked above)

Cross Posted at Power and Control and at Classical Values