THE VICE PRESIDENT:  Thank you, Mr. President.  (Applause.)  It’s great to be here.  It’s great to be here.  (Applause.)  Hey, Debbie.

Ladies and gentlemen, oh, what a difference 40 years makes.  (Laughter.)  I look out there and see an old friend, Annette Lantos.  Annette, how are you?  Her husband, Tom Lantos, a survivor, was my assistant, was my foreign policy advisor for years.  And Tom used to say all the time, Joe — he talked with that Hungarian accent — he’d say, Joe, we must do another fundraiser for AIPAC.  (Laughter.)  I did more fundraisers for AIPAC in the ‘70s and early ‘80s than — just about as many as anybody.  Thank God you weren’t putting on shows like this, we would have never made it.  (Laughter.)  We would have never made it.

My Lord, it’s so great to be with you all and great to see — Mr. President, thank you so much for that kind introduction.  And President-elect Bob Cohen, the entire AIPAC Board of Directors, I’m delighted to be with you today.  But I’m particularly delighted to be with an old friend — and he is an old friend; we use that phrase lightly in Washington, but it’s real, and I think he’d even tell you — Ehud Barak, it’s great to be with you, Mr. Minister.  Great to be with you.  (Applause.)

• Remarks by the Vice President to the AIPAC Policy Conference | The White House.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you all very, very much. It is a real honor to be here at AIPAC’s Policy Conference. It’s a particular honor to be here with my good friend and one of Congress’s strongest pro-Israel allies that you will hear from in just a minute, Steny Hoyer.

Tonight we celebrate a friendship between two countries, simple in concept but mighty in force. This friendship is centered on commitment to community and dedication to faith. It values education, human progress, and the guarantee of opportunity for all. With this friendship the world is a better place.

The alliance between the United States and Israel is often tested but never shaken. We’ve helped protect each other. We’ve helped protect our friends, and we’ve helped protect humanity. If there is a tsunami, our military and aid ships are the first to set sail. If disease is ravaging a nation, whereas is the case of AIDS in Africa, an entire continent, we send help, and we save lives. Israel shares our moral compass. When massive earthquakes struck Haiti and Turkey, Israel was among the first to offer assistance, and hundreds of Israeli rescue workers responded. They responded to the deadly terrorist attacks in East Africa, saving the lives of Africans injured in the attacks on our America’s embassies.

For those of us who visited Israel, you know what a special place it is. You’ve walked down the Tayelet in Tel Aviv on Thursday afternoon, and you’ve seen the people leisurely lingering in cafes as the waves of the Mediterranean crash in the background. But for many Americans the only images of Israel that they see are blown out clubs and cafes, missiles firing, death, and tragedy. That in itself is a tragedy. These news stories often miss the beauty and the human element of why our nations care so much for one another. But these stories do serve as a constant reminder of the threat Israel faces and why Israel needs our friendship and needs it now.

• Watch the video of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s speech to AIPAC.

Good morning. Thank you, Lonnie, for your gracious introduction and above all your support and friendship over many years. And thank you to AIPAC for the warm welcome you have always given me at every event that I have attended. I appreciate your advocacy.

And let me also recognize in the Jersey delegation there are some 500 of you here today. Many of you are here and I know friends like Steve Klinghoffer, Mike Levin and others are leading the way. So again, let’s hear it for New Jersey. Thank you for your engagement.

And let me just say to all of you at AIPAC, all who are committed to the strongest possible relationship between the United States and Israel, as I have been throughout my public service career, that I look forward to working with you in my new role as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. It is one of the Senate’s it is one of the Senate’s original 10 standing committees and it has helped shape American foreign policy through the complex geopolitics of an ever-changing world.

• Watch the video of Senator Robert Menendez.

Thanks so much, Roger! As you just heard, Roger accompanied me on my first trip to Israel back in 2002, and he and Linden have become dear friends to my wife, Sandy, and me.

I want to thank Roger, Howard Kohr, Marvin Feuer, and all my other good friends at AIPAC for inviting me to speak here tonight. I’m especially grateful given the latest approval ratings for Congress.

In all seriousness: I understand why many Americans look at Washington, D.C., and shake their heads. It often seems that every single issue has been turned into a political football.

However, I want to assure you, on the issue of U.S. support for Israel, we’ve been able to maintain an overwhelming bipartisan consensus.

But that should come as no surprise. We all know that the strong support for Israel on Capitol Hill reflects the strong support for Israel in cities, towns, and communities across America. We know that Americans feel a kinship with Israel because our countries share common values, such as liberty, equality, and human rights. America and Israel have stayed true to these values even as we have responded to murderous attacks by some of the most ruthless terrorist organizations on the planet.

• Read more and watch the video of Senate Republican Whip John Cornyn at the AIPAC 2013 Policy Conference.

By Claudia Rosett

On Wednesday, under the crystal chandeliers of Vienna’s ornate Hofberg Palace, the prime minister of Turkey delivered a speech in which he called Zionism “a crime against humanity” — equating it with fascism, and, for good measure, Islamophobia and anti-Semitism. Following his remarks, Erdogan was thanked, and applauded.

The occasion was a February 27–28 meeting of an outfit called the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations, launched in 2005 by former secretary general Kofi Annan for the purpose of “bridging divides.” Among those attending this latest conclave of the Alliance were U.N. secretary general Ban Ki-moon; director general Irina Bokova of the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO); and such celebrities of the diplomatic circuit as Iranian foreign minister Ali Akbar Salehi.

• The U.N.’s Anti-Semitic Alliance – Claudia Rosett – National Review Online.

Wednesday, December 19, 2012

(WASHINGTON)- U.S. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, issued the following statement on the UN General Assembly’s passage of nine resolutions in a single day condemning Israel. Earlier this week, a Syrian airstrike on a mosque in a refugee camp near Damascus killed 25 people, yet the General Assembly neglected to adopt a resolution criticizing Syria for this attack. Statement by Ros-Lehtinen:

• Via UN’s Blatant Bias On Display as It Passes Nine Resolutions Against Israel, Ros-Lehtinen Says – House Committee on Foreign Affairs.

General Assembly resolution 194 of December 11, 1948,[1] offers two options, repatriation and resettlement, to achieve the reintegration of the Palestinian Arab refugees “into the economic life of the Near East.”[2] Yet, U.S. Department of State documents from 1949 through the early 1950s reveal that despite the lip service paid to repatriation, Washington and its allies effectively equated reintegration with the resettlement of the refugees in the neighboring Arab states.

Historical Context

Economic development has been viewed by successive U.S. administrations as the key to integrating regions and peoples, and since the 1930s, their vision of this endeavor was largely modeled on the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) project.

Created by an act of the U.S. Congress in 1933, the TVA was conceived as a regional economic development agency. It was tasked with responsibilities for flood control, electrification, reforestation, fertilizer production, agricultural education, and river navigation throughout the Tennessee Valley, an area that includes the state of Tennessee, parts of Kentucky, Mississippi, and Alabama, and smaller portions of Georgia, North Carolina, and Virginia.

• Via Washington’s Failure to Rein in UNRWA :: Middle East Quarterly.

In the course of the first week of the 67th Session of the UN General Assembly a great deal of media attention has been paid to Prime Minister Netanyahu’s speech, which focused on the problem posed by Iran’s nuclear program. By contrast, very little attention was paid to the speech of President Mahmoud Abbas, a speech that offers very little hope of a peace agreement in the near future.

Abbas made it quite clear that he is not prepared to enter into negotiations with Israel. As he put it “marathon negotiations are not required to determine … the core components of a just solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.” These components, he said, “are the clearest and most logical in the world.” They include “the realization of the independence of the State of Palestine, with East Jerusalem as its capital, over the entire territory occupied by Israel since 1967, and the realization of a just, agreed solution to the Palestine refugee issue in accordance with resolution 194 (iii), as prescribed in the Arab Peace Initiative.”

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For close to forty years, the UN has served as the center of a worldwide effort to delegitimize Israel. It started when Fidel Castro and Muammar Qaddafi, after competing for the leadership of the Non-Aligned Movement, decided in the early 1970′s to join in an effort to take control of the agenda of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA). Castro brought to this effort the member states of the Soviet bloc at the UN. Qaddafi brought the Organization of the Islamic Conference (now known as the Organization for Islamic Cooperation).

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Recent events have introduced the question of the status of Jerusalem into the political debate.  That in turn has produced a good deal of media commentary, reminding the general public of the fact that the seat of government of the State of Israel is Jerusalem, but the U.S. Embassy, as well as other embassies, are located in Tel Aviv.  Note has also been taken of the fact that in 1995 Congress called for moving the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, but allowed the President to waive that provision of law if a waiver is deemed to be in the national interest.  Waivers have been issued, at regular intervals, by Presidents Clinton, G.W. Bush, and Obama.

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