Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu went to the Western Wall Wednesday in his first post-election night public appearance after sweeping to victory and said he was moved by the responsibility placed on his shoulders.

“Here, in this place, I am awed by the historical significance of a people renewing itself in its homeland after 4,000 years,” he said, after praying at the Wall and placing a note inside its crevices. “I am moved by the weight of responsibility that the people of Israel have placed on my shoulders, and appreciate the decision of Israeli citizens to chose me and my colleagues against all odds.”

A day after he triggered a barrage of criticism for urging his supporters to go out and vote because “Arab voters were going in large numbers to the polls,” Netanyahu pledged to work for the “welfare and security of all the citizens of Israel.”

Netanyahu was accompanied to the Wall by his wife, Sara. He last went there some three weeks ago, just before going to Washington to speak to Congress. Zionist Union's Isaac Herzog went to the Wall on Sunday, two days before the elections.

Last week’s call for the formation of a continental task-force on anti-Semitism by European Commission President Federica Mogherini is very welcome but steps must be taken to ensure that such rhetoric is translated into a concrete action plan, the Foreign Ministry stated.

“We welcome the initiative to set up a task force to combat anti-Semitism and hope that it will be an active force that will contribute in a real and significant way in the battle against rising European anti-Semitism,” ministry spokesman Nahshon Emmanuel told The Jerusalem Post.

It is very important that European institutions take part in this effort with an “organized action plan and a clear and organized agenda,” he added. These “most important and encouraging statements from European leaders” must be translated into “very clear action.”

Last week Mogherini told Italian daily La Repubblica that she had endorsed the idea of a taskforce to the EU commissioner dealing with issues of fundamental rights.

“I transferred the idea to Frans Timmermans, who has the formal authority in this issue, and we are already working on various initiatives,” she said, according to a translation of the statement this week on the EUobserver website.

Mogherini’s statement was welcomed by Jewish leaders across Europe although an anti-Semitism watchdog in England warned that that calls for a new body to deal with hatred “miss the essential point, which is the actual ability or willingness of member states to implement recommendations, such as those already made in existing EU and EC forums.”

Late last month American senators introduced a bi-partisan resolution calling on European leaders to appoint national anti-Semitism czars to monitor and combat hate against their countries’ Jewish minorities

While negotiations continue in Lausanne, Congress and Tehran’s parliament throw a wrench in the gears

BY AFP AND TIMES OF ISRAEL STAFF March 15, 2015, 6:56 pm| The Times of Israel|
 

U S Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell warned Sunday that American was “on the cusp of entering into a very bad deal” with Iran. On CNN’s

“State of the Union,” McConnell called Iran “one of the worst regimes in the world” and said that the current deal “would allow them to continue to

have their nuclear infrastructure.” “We’re alarmed about it,” he added. “We will either be voting on a bill that would require the deal to come to Congress.

The president said he would veto that. Or if there is no deal, we’ll be voting on a bill that says the sanctions need to be ratcheted up,” he said. Last Tuesday

McConnell said debate on bipartisan legislation requiring US President Barack Obama to submit any nuclear deal with Iran to Congress for its approval should begin next week.

That debate could also open the door for consideration of new economic sanctions on the regime in Tehran, a move strongly opposed by the Obama administration amid ongoing international negotiations with Iran. While the US Congress continues its debate on increased sanctions, their counterparts in the Iranian Parliament are calling for an end to sanctions altogether against the Islamic Republic. In a statement, Iranian MPs stressed the need for the removal

of all sanctions, restoration of the nuclear rights of the Iranian nation and objective assurances binding the US compliance with the agreement, the Fars News Agency reported. The US bill requiring congressional review of any nuclear agreement “will be on the floor of the Senate for debate next week,” McConnell told reporters last week.

It would give Congress 60 days to hold hearings and classified briefings on the deal, and either approve or reject it. The bill was introduced by Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman Bob Corker and the panel’s top Democrat, Senator Robert Menendez. The White House has already threatened to veto the legislation because the administration wants flexibility to hammer out an accord with Iran and other international negotiators without meddling from Congress.

Obama’s chief of staff Denis McDonough confirmed that any nuclear agreement between Iran and the P5+1 group of world powers would be subject to a vote by the UN Security Council. “Just as it is true that only Congress can terminate US statutory sanctions on Iran, only the Security Council can terminate the Security Council’s sanctions on Iran,” McDonough said in a letter on Saturday to Bob Corker, the Republican head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

“Because the principal negotiators of an arrangement with Iran are the five permanent members of the Security Council, we anticipate that the Security Council would pass a resolution to register its support for any deal and increase its international legitimacy,” he said. Legislation that would impose sanctions in the event no final deal is reached by the end of July, a deadline imposed by negotiators, passed the foreign relations committee on January 29.

In Iran, Chairman of the Parliament’s Nuclear Committee Ebrahim Karkhaneyee said Sunday, “A sum of 226 lawmakers have already put their signatures down the statement which lays emphasis on the inalienable rights of the Iranian nation and calls for the removal of all sanctions.” Several Democrats including Menendez told Obama in late January that they would not vote on Iran sanctions until after March 24.

With Congress in recess in the final week of March, that would give the administration room to reach a political deal with Iran by their initial March 31 deadline. “Certainly, if no agreement is reached, we’ll need to ratchet up the sanctions,” McConnell said last Tuesday. 

SACRAMENTO - Students at two University of California campuses have passed resolutions condemning anti-Semitism after incidents on two UC campuses, including the painting of swastikas on the doors of a Jewish fraternity at UC Davis.

The UCLA Undergraduate Students Association unanimously passed a resolution on Tuesday amid controversy over the tough grilling of a Jewish candidate for a student office at UCLA in which student government representatives interviewing her questioned her ability to be impartial because of her religion.

At UC Berkeley, the student senate passed a resolution condemning anti-Semitism late last month, after the Davis and UCLA incidents had occurred.

"This represents an important step towards an inclusive and safe climate, especially in light of recent events," UCLA student association president Avinoam Baral said on Wednesday.

The campus incidents, along with disquiet in Sacramento after a man in the River Park neighborhood festooned his house with swastikas imposed on an Israeli flag, have prompted worries in Jewish and civil rights circles in California that anti-Semitism may be on the rise.

On Monday, lawmakers of different faiths, several rabbis and the NAACP held a rally on the steps of the state capitol in Sacramento condemning anti-Semitism. Several hundred people attended.

Speaking at the rally, Darrell Steinberg, formerly the top Democrat in the state senate, called on all UC campuses to adopt resolutions condemning anti-Semitism as well as Islamophobia and racism.

He said he was concerned that legitimate disagreement with the policies of Israel had veered into acceptance of old prejudices against Jews.

"All too often, anti-Israel feelings serve as a shield for anti-Semitism," said Steinberg, who is Jewish.

Tensions over Middle East politics are high on campuses in California, where some students and professors have called for divestment from companies doing business with the Israeli military.

Students at UC Davis voted in January to support such divestment, and last month, the undergraduate senate at Stanford passed a similar resolution.

The UC Berkeley resolution said "many incidents of anti-Semitism occur both inside and outside of the classroom on UC campuses." It condemned the swastikas sprayed on the wall of the Alpha Epsilon Pi fraternity house at UC Davis and set up a committee to examine anti-Semitism on campus.

‘Extraordinarily reasonable,” President Obama called it in an interview aired on Sunday, referring to the multiparty deal being negotiated on Iran’s nuclear-weapons program. When the talks began, Mr. Obama said it was “unacceptable” for Iran to acquire nuclear weapons. Now it isn’t clear whether that is actually his view.

On Capitol Hill, distrust of the president is intense, fueled by resentment that he doesn’t intend to submit the nuclear deal for congressional approval. Forty-seven Republican senators on Monday sent a letter to Tehran explaining that a future U.S. president or Congress could easily revoke an agreement not validated by this Congress. Mr. Obama responded testily, accusing the signers of making “common cause with the hard-liners in Iran.”

Under the pending deal, Iran can maintain large nuclear facilities and continue enriching uranium. Mr. Obama says this is fine because Iran would have to allow inspections of specified nuclear sites. In response, also on TV Sunday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, “I do not trust inspections with totalitarian regimes. What I’m suggesting is that you contract Iran’s nuclear program, so there’s less to inspect.”

The key, in Mr. Netanyahu’s view, is to pressure Iran to dismantle major facilities. That way, if Tehran eventually decides to abandon the deal, the regime would have to work much more than a year to produce a nuclear weapon. In addition, Mr. Netanyahu says, sanctions should remain in place until Iran stops threatening its neighbors and supporting terrorism. Mr. Obama says such demands are unrealistic. They would kill the talks, he asserts, and leave only a military option.

But at the heart of the Obama-Netanyahu dispute—and of the president’s clash with Congress—is not diplomacy versus war. It’s the difference between cooperative diplomacy and coercive diplomacy.

By taking a cooperative approach, Mr. Obama insists, the U.S. and others can persuade Iran’s ruling ayatollahs to play by rules that all parties voluntarily accept. In contrast, the coercive option, which Mr. Netanyahu favors, assumes that Iran will remain hostile, dishonest and dangerous. The coercive approach sees Iran’s nuclear program as a symptom of the hostility between Iran and the West, but not as the source of the hostility. Coercion means America and its friends would use trade and financial restrictions, diplomatic isolation and other methods (short of military strikes) to pressure a resistant Iran into changing its behavior.

When Mr. Obama says the Israeli leader has offered “no viable alternative” to the deal being negotiated, he is denying that a coercive option exists. But Mr. Netanyahu’s point is that we can have one if we try. U.S. officials would need to exert leadership by highlighting Iranian threats, prescribing ways to limit them and soliciting other countries’ support.

There are two major problems with Mr. Obama’s cooperative approach. The first is the nature of Iran’s regime. The second is the history of attempts to constrain bad actors through cooperative approaches such as arms control and peace accords.

The Iranian regime is theocratic and revolutionary. It came to power in 1979 on a wave of extremist religious ideology and remains committed to exporting its revolution. Its leaders despise liberalism and democracy. They particularly hate Western respect for the rights of women and homosexuals. The regime remains in power through torture and murder of its domestic critics. It makes frequent use of public executions—the numbers have increased lately even though President Hasan Rouhani is commonly called a reformer.

Abroad, the Iranian regime acts as a rogue. Its agents and terrorist proxies have committed bombings and other murders in countries including France, Argentina, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon and Iraq. A U.S. court convicted Iranian agents of plotting in 2011 to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the U.S. by bombing a Washington, D.C., restaurant. Iranian officials foment hatred of the U.S. and Israel and call for the annihilation of both.

Iranian leaders have a long record of shameless dishonesty. Their aid to the tyrannical Assad regime has been massive since the Syrian civil war began, but they routinely deny it. And they make a practice of lying to United Nations weapons inspectors. Commenting on how the inspectors have repeatedly been surprised by what Iran hides, Olli Heinonen, former deputy director-general of the U.N.’s International Atomic Energy Agency, told this newspaper in 2013, “If there is no undeclared installation today . . . it will be the first time in 20 years that Iran doesn’t have one.”

Iran is a bad actor, and history teaches that constraining bad actors through arms control and peace accords is a losing bet. The arms-control approach is to invite bad actors to sign legal agreements. This produces signing ceremonies, where political leaders can act as if there’s nobody here but us peaceable, law-abiding global citizens. The deal makers get to celebrate their accords at least until the bad actors inevitably violate them.

Nazi Germany violated the Versailles Treaty. The Soviet Union violated the Biological Weapons Convention, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, various nuclear-arms treaties and other international agreements. The Palestine Liberation Organization violated the Oslo Accords. North Korea violated the Agreed Framework.

Patterns emerge from this history. When leaders of democratic countries extract promises of good behavior from bad-actor regimes, those democratic leaders reap political rewards. They are hailed as peacemakers. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain was cheered when he returned from Munich in 1938 with “peace in our time.” These leaders have a stake in their deals looking good. When those deals are violated, the “peacemakers” often challenge the evidence. If the evidence is clear, they dismiss the violations as unimportant. When the importance is undeniable, they argue that there aren’t any good options for confronting the violators.

In the end, the bad actors often pay little or nothing for their transgressions. And even if the costs are substantial, they are bearable. Just ask Russia’s Vladimir Putin , or Syria’s Bashar Assad or North Korea’s Kim Jong Un.

The Obama administration has wedded itself to a cooperative policy toward Iran. The White House rejects the coercive approach as not viable. But if Iran violates its deal with us, won’t our response have to be coercive? President Obama insists that his policy is the only realistic one. In doing so, he is showing either that he is naïve and uninformed about the relevant history or that he no longer considers an Iranian nuclear weapon “unacceptable.”

ByCBS NEWS |CBS NEWS |March 8, 2015, 6:14 PM 

(For continued transcript refer to: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/face-the-nation-transcripts-march-8-2015-net...)