Hypocrite @JohnBrennan bashes Israel for doing things HE supported as CIA chief for Obama

To be a good intelligence officer, one needs to be able to look at the facts dispassionately and without bias.

Based on the editorial he just wrote for the New York Times, former CIA director John Brennan is an incompetent intelligence analyst.

He starts off with describing how humiliating checkpoints are - based on a short fictional film.

I knew that Israel had legitimate security concerns in the aftermath of the 1967 and 1973 wars, worries that had been heightened by attacks on Israeli and Jewish targets by Palestinian terrorist organizations.

Half a century has passed, and the political and security landscape of the Middle East has profoundly changed.

Israel has signed peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan. The Abraham Accords, brokered by the United States last year, have paved the way for four more Arab states — the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco — to establish diplomatic relations with Israel. 

There also has been significant progress in reducing violence carried out by Palestinians inside and outside the occupied territories. The exception is Hamas, which continues to launch rocket attacks into Israel from the Gaza Strip.

The implication is that checkpoints are no longer necessary because the Palestinian security forces are adequate to do the job.

In 2009, Brennan told a newspaper, "the U.S. intelligence and law enforcement communities have to bat 1.000 every day. The terrorists are trying to be successful just once." 

And how does one stop them? Brennan had defended the Bush administration support for "advanced interrogation techniques" and the policy of extraordinary rendition, moving terrorism suspects to countries where they might be tortured.

But suddenly he is critical of Israel's techniques to keep terrorists out of the country. Moreover, he ignores that Israel has spent millions to improve the checkpoints, some of which have reduced the amount of time to cross the border into minutes.

The major hurdle will be to reverse the trend of diminished interest that the Israeli government has shown in pursuing a two-state solution. Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has spearheaded relentless expansion of settlements in the West Bank. That expansion has brought along more concrete walls, security barriers and control points.

During the Obama administration while Brennan was CIA director, Israel accepted a peace framework suggested by the US which would have led to a Palestinian state - and the Palestinians didn't only reject that, but they rejected a plan that was much more favorable to them. They even bragged about their rejectionism to Susan Rice, who told them effectively that they were idiots. 

Under Netanyahu, there have been virtually no new settlements although existing ones have more people. The amount of space Israel controls is likewise essentially the same as it was during the Oslo process. Israel's policies have not made the two state solution less likely - Palestinian rejection of peace has. 

The most offensive thing Brennan wrote, however, was not in the article. It was in a tweet promoting the article. It shows that his years as an Arabist (American University in Beirut, CIA station chief in Riyadh) has given him antisemitic tendencies:

I always found it difficult to fathom how a nation of people deeply scarred by a history replete with prejudice, religious persecution, & unspeakable violence perpetrated against them would not be the empathetic champions of those whose rights & freedoms are still abridged.

This is a polite version of the "Jews are Nazis" trope. 

Brennan is saying that Israeli Jews are heartless monsters who don't care about Palestinian human rights It is a pernicious lie. Israeli Jews may be paranoid, but they have good reason for their paranoia. 

During this holy month of Ramadan, Palestinian youths are celebrating by attacking religious Jews for fun and TikTok videos. Should this be ignored?

The issue, as always, isn't whether Palestinians deserve human rights. No one argues with that. The issue is how to best balance Palestinian human rights with Israeli human rights. 

The reason that the number of attacks has gone down isn't only because of Palestinian security services frustrating terror attacks - it is because Israel created an atmosphere through defensive measures like fences and checkpoints, as well as pro-active attacks on terror cells, to make it less likely that terror attacks would succeed. 

It wasn't that long ago that Palestinians were writing their own op-eds justifying terror attacks as legitimate. 

And it was only a couple of weeks ago that Palestinian TV heavily promoted a music video inciting terrorism:

Should Israel take these threats seriously - should they try to bat 1.000 - or should they just shrug off this incitement and terrorism?

It is more than condescending for "experts' to tell Jews that the lesson of Auschwitz is to be sensitive to human rights. Guess what - we are, and we were way before Nazi Germany. The lesson of Auschwitz is to take threats to murder Jews seriously and ensure that they are not successful. 

When the threats go away, so will the checkpoints. 

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