Category Archives: International news

International news

Mr. POTUS, stand firm

By John Kanelis / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

President Biden has a meeting coming up soon with a guy who once had another president twisted around his pinky finger.

I do not expect the same kind of kowtowing from the current POTUS as it regards Russian strongman Vladimir Putin.

The leaders will meet in their first summit encounter in Geneva.

My hope and my expectation is that Joe Biden will give Putin an earful about some of the issues that went unspoken between Putin and Donald J. Trump.

You know what they are: Russian interference in our elections; Russian human rights violations; and the bounties that Russians paid the Taliban terrorist/goons for Americans they killed in battle in Afghanistan.

Putin is a bad actor. He runs a rogue nation that presents itself as an economic and military power when it is a third-rate nation at almost every level imaginable.

Putin played Donald Trump like a fiddle. He doesn’t figure to do the same thing to President Biden.

Stand firm, Mr. President.

International news

What happened to Middle East peace?

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By John Kanelis / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

This thought just kicked in.

Didn’t the most recent ex-POTUS task his son-in-law to come up with a comprehensive peace agreement?

Jared Kushner got the assignment from Donald Trump. He went here and there during Trump’s term in office. The administration announced deals between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and with Bahrain, right?

But what about Hamas, the terrorists who run the West Bank and Gaza? They launched rockets into Israel; the Israelis fought back.

Then the Joe Biden administration turned up the heat on the Israelis and on Hamas to get a cease-fire deal done … as in right now!

They did.

However, I am just wondering why Jared Kushner’s alleged diplomatic “genius” failed to produce an agreement.

International news

‘Quiet diplomacy’ might need more volume

By John Kanelis / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

President Biden is committed to working through “quiet diplomacy” to end the fighting between Israel and the terrorists who govern the Gaza Strip and who have been launching rockets into Israeli cities.

Allow me this caveat: The quiet diplomacy that Biden prefers might need to get a bit louder if matters don’t settle down soon in the region.

Biden keeps to ‘quiet diplomacy’ as calls for Israel-Hamas cease-fire ramp up (msn.com)

The Israelis have hit back hard at Hamas, which governs Gaza and the West Bank. Hamas has dedicated itself to the destruction of Israel and has launched the rockets to protest Israeli settlements in Palestinian territory.

It has targeted civilians. Hamas has been indiscriminate in killing innocent people.

President Biden should be able to use his formidable contacts with leaders in the region to seek to broker some sort of peace agreement. He is working the phones. He is talking through back channels. I wish him — and those in the region — all the very best to search for peace.

Quiet diplomacy, though, might not be enough. I hope the president is prepared to turn up the volume when the moment presents itself.

International news

Stay the course on Israel, Mr. POTUS

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By John Kanelis / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

President Biden needs to resist the pressure coming from the left wing of the Democratic Party regarding the exploding tensions between Israel and the Palestinians.

Israel is striking back hard at Hamas terrorists who have been launching missiles into Israeli neighborhoods, targeting civilians in their attempt to get Israel to change its settlement policy in Palestinian territory.

Joe Biden has long held during his half-century in public life that Israel is our most important ally in the Middle East, yet the far-left within the Democratic Party are pressuring him to look more kindly on the terrorists who are demanding social justice.

I get their concern. I want Israel and the Palestinians to live in peace as much as anyone. I also believe the Israelis have shown sufficient patience at terrorists — such as Hamas — keep threatening the lives of Israeli civilians.

As the New York Times reported: Less than 24 hours later, on Friday, nearly 150 prominent liberal advocacy organizations issued a joint statement calling for “solidarity with the Palestinian residents” and condemning “Israeli state violence” and “supremacy” in Jerusalem.

Tensions Among Democrats Grow Over Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (msn.com)

Biden’s instincts are correct. He needs no lecture from those on the fringes of his party on how to deal with the Palestinians. Does he want a two-state solution? Yes. Does he want to stand in “solidarity” with Palestinians? That’s a dicey proposition, given this nation’s long-standing “solidarity” with Israel.

We should stand strongly with Israel while seeking a permanent peace in the region that knows unbearable heartache.

International news

Where is outrage at Hamas?

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By John Kanelis / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Allow me this brief rejoinder to the criticism that’s being leveled at Israel over its airstrikes against the terrorists who have been launching rockets into civilian neighborhoods.

The Israeli air force has been hitting Hamas strongholds in reaction to the rockets that have flown into Bethlehem, into Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Askelon.

Critics have blasted the Israelis because some of their strikes have killed civilians. Make no mistake that I am horrified, too, that civilians have died in these strikes against Hamas. I detest the loss of innocent life in these military exchanges.

But where in the hell has been the outrage aimed at Hamas … which aims its rockets deliberately at civilian targets?

I had the high honor of touring Israel a dozen years ago and I saw up close the building requirements that Israeli homeowners must face. Those requirement mandate reinforced bomb shelters in every home, given that the nation sits a spitting distance away from forces bent on the destruction of their country.

The latest exchange in Israel must come to an end and I pray that it will. Israel, to my way of thinking, has shown incredible restraint in dealing with Hamas and other terrorists who take direct aim at women and children in their effort to destroy their country.

International news

Heart bursts with conflicting emotion

By John Kanelis / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Twelve years ago this week I had the honor of beginning a marvelous journey through one of the world’s holiest — and deadliest — regions.

I accompanied four young West Texans to Israel on a Rotary International Group Study Exchange; once we arrived, we hooked up with another team of GSE members from The Netherlands. Today we are sharing our heartache at the video we all are watching from our homes as Israelis launch air strikes in retaliation of the rockets launched into sacred places by the terrorist group Hamas that governs Gaza.

You see, our journey through Israel took us to the doorstep of Gaza. We visited the Western Wall in Jerusalem. We toured all the quarters of the Old City. We walked along the Via Dolorosa where Jesus Christ strode 2,000 years ago, and we prayed on the Mount of Olives.

Now the region is being threatened once again by the horrifying terror that falls from the sky. Hamas is dedicated to Israel’s destruction. That is a fact. I will not argue the point in this brief blog post about why Hamas has decided to launch rockets into Israel.

I am going to express worry about the men and women we met along our marvelous journey. Are they safe? Have they been caught in the crossfire?

My friends with whom I traveled for those four weeks in Israel know of the love I have for them. I also have much love for the many people we met along our way through that holy place. We shared meals with them, we toasted them, we danced with them, we shared our life stories with them.

I am praying for their safety and for an end to the violence that keeps erupting in that holy and sacred land.

International news, national news

Russia is not our equal

By John Kanelis / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Donald J. Trump was fond of telling us — perhaps he still is, for that matter — that it “would be nice if we got along with Russia.”

His strategy for making nice with Russia meant sucking up to its strongman, Vladimir Putin. It meant giving Russia a pass when it interfered in our election and denying our own intelligence analysis that said the Russians did interfere. It meant never challenging Russia over reports that it paid Taliban terrorists a bounty for killing Americans on the battlefields of Afghanistan.

Trump’s strategy didn’t work. Putin didn’t take the American president seriously. He played Trump like a fiddle.

President Joe Biden has taken over. He isn’t going to play nice with what is a third-rate military power and a fourth- or maybe fifth-rate economic power.

There can be no mistaking that Russia wanted Trump elected in 2016 and re-elected in 2020. It hacked into our electoral system and sought to undermine the candidacies of Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. Why? Because it would get a better deal — from their standpoint — with Donald Trump.

President Biden has made it clear that he intends to hold Russia accountable for the mischief it is making around the world.

Biden is only 102 days into the presidency. He wasn’t granted the courtesy extended usually to new presidents from those they succeed. Donald Trump did not allow his national security team to consult openly and freely with the new POTUS’s team.

I only can presume that President Biden will deal with Russia from his lofty perch as commander in chief of the world’s greatest military and as head of state of the world’s most vibrant economy.

Yes, I get that Russia still has all those nuclear weapons left over from its Soviet Union era. I also know that the doctrine of mutual assured destruction if they chose to use them has kept the rival nations from going, um … “MAD.”

Making nice with Russia? It’s a non-starter. Period.

International news

Bin Laden mission needed time

By John Kanelis / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Americans are going to be marking a date over the weekend that should fill them with justifiable pride in the capabilities of our military special forces.

It was on May 1, 2011 that Navy SEALs and CIA commandos raided a compound in Pakistan and killed Osama bin Laden, the leader of al-Qaeda and the mastermind of the 9/11 terror attack that had occurred a decade earlier.

Ten years have passed since that raid.

I want to talk briefly here about something that flew out of Donald Trump’s mouth not long after Army Special Forces killed the Islamic State leader on Trump’s watch.

The then-president suggested out loud that the bin Laden raid should have occurred far earlier than it did. Trump was crowing about the success his team had in finding Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and dispatching him. Why couldn’t the Special Forces Command do the same with bin Laden, Trump said.

The military commander of that mission was Admiral William McRaven, himself a SEAL and head of the Special Ops Command. It took McRaven’s team time to assemble and analyze all the intelligence it had collected on bin Laden’s location. Indeed, as President Obama said at the time, he wasn’t absolutely sure that bin Laden would be in the compound once the SEALs and the CIA spooks arrived. It was a gamble … but it paid off!

Thus, for Trump to denigrate the great work that anti-terrorism experts from the Bush and Obama administrations did to locate and to ascertain with some degree of certainty that their findings were correct simply went beyond the pale.

I am going to celebrate the victory our forces scored when they eliminated Osama bin Laden. No amount of cheap second-guessing ever would denigrate the courage of the commander in chief to issue the order and the extraordinary skill of the men who executed it.

International news

Yes, it was genocide

By John Kanelis / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Joe Biden never has struck me as a politician willing to blaze many new trails. Still, as president of the United States, Biden has made a declaration that seemed to scare off every one of his predecessors for the past century.

No U.S. president, Democrat or Republican, has been willing to categorize the Ottoman Empire’s massacre of Armenians as an act of “genocide” … until now.

Biden made the declaration today after talking with Turkish President Tayycip Erdogan, apparently warning the strongman of his intention to do what he did today.

So, you might wonder: Why the presidential reticence?

Turkey is a key member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which was founded after World War II to deter possible aggression from what was called the Soviet Union. Thus, previous U.S. presidents were concerned about offending Turkey, upon which NATO depends as an important military ally.

President Biden has tossed those concerns aside.

The reality is that in 1915, Turkey set about to execute more than 1.5 million Armenians in what only can be described as a form of “ethnic cleansing.” Put another way, they engaged in genocide against an ethnic minority.

According to Yahoo News:

“Beginning on April 24, 1915, with the arrest of Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in Constantinople by Ottoman authorities, one and a half million Armenians were deported, massacred, or marched to their deaths in a campaign of extermination,” Biden said in a statement on Saturday, marking Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day. He emphasized the need to recognize and remember such atrocities “so that the horrors of what happened are never lost to history.”

“The American people honor all those Armenians who perished in the genocide that began 106 years ago today,” Biden said. “We honor their story. We see that pain. We affirm the history. We do this not to cast blame but to ensure that what happened is never repeated.

Biden recognizes as ‘genocide’ the killing of 1.5M Armenians by Ottoman Turks (yahoo.com)

Yes, President Biden is trying to walk along a nuanced line. I get that. It also signals a presidential intention to ensure that human rights remains at the top of our foreign-policy consciousness.

International news

Human rights returns!

By John Kanelis / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

President Biden has laid the law down on a dictator with whom this nation is bonded through a military alliance.

Biden and Turkish president Tayyip Erdogan have talked. The president told Erdogan that he considers the Ottoman Empire’s extermination of millions of Armenians to be an act of genocide. He intends as well to bring it up when the men meet in a bilateral encounter later this year during the annual meeting of nations that belong to NATO, of which Turkey is a member.

This is a big deal. Why? Because the American presidency has lacked any open discussion of human rights violations for the past four years. Donald Trump chose to ignore these and other international abuses of human dignity during his tenure in the White House. President Biden is returning human rights to the table.

To which I say … yes!

The Hill reports: The White House readout of the call noted the two men would meet this summer but made no mention of discussion about the potential genocide declaration, which Turkey has long lobbied against strenuously. Bloomberg News later reported that Biden informed Erdogan that he plans to recognize the massacre of Armenians as genocide.

Biden, Erdoğan speak amid tensions over Armenian genocide (msn.com)

The world is full of human rights abuses — and abusers. You can spare me the rejoinder about such abuses occurring here at home. I am fully aware of them. As is President Biden. Still, he intends to exert his moral authority as the leader of this great nation to remind others around the world that all humans have inalienable rights that deserve honor and respect.

I welcome the president of the United States engaging in  that critical discussion.