Jones With His Foot in His Mouth

Yid With Lid pointed me to a really stupid performance by James Jones.

The National Security Advisor, General Jones gave the key note speech at the Washington Institute For Near East Policy and decided to tell a joke he thinks is true. Others thought it bordered on the anti-Semitic, a la Shylock.

The joke:

A Taliban militant gets lost and is wandering around the desert looking for water. He finally arrives at a store run by a Jew and asks for water. The Jewish vendor tells him he doesn’t have any water but can gladly sell him a tie. The Taliban, the jokes goes on, begins to curse and yell at the Jewish store owner. The Jew, unmoved, offers the rude militant an idea: Beyond the hill, there is a restaurant; they can sell you water. The Taliban keeps cursing and finally leaves toward the hill. An hour later he’s back at the tie store. He walks in and tells the merchant: “Your brother tells me I need a tie to get into the restaurant.”

You can see and hear it here, too.


That he introduces the joke, which I have heard for over two decades now in various forms, as "being true" is really either stupid of Jones or indicative of a mindset which would be "Jew-inimical".

And he should be aware that not all jokes concerning Jews (even though after six decades, I can tell you that the same jokes move about the ethnic groups quite easily) one tells in public, even if they are funny and even if Jews themselves tell them which means not only is Jones insensitive but dumb.


____________

UPDATE


Statement from General Jones about the joke he told during his remarks at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy

“I wish that I had not made this off the cuff joke at the top of my remarks, and I apologize to anyone who was offended by it. It also distracted from the larger message I carried that day: that the United States commitment to Israel’s security is sacrosanct.” – General Jim Jones, National Security Advisor

SECOND UPDATE

Let’s unpack this. First of all, I don’t believe the joke was made up on the spur of the moment. That’s not how these things work. As a reader pointed out to me, it’s quite likely that not only Jones but also a speechwriter or two thought there was nothing much wrong with this. Second, for an administration under criticism for insensitivity or outright animus in relation to Israel, why play with fire? If nothing else, this confirms the criticism of Jones — he’s a bit of a buffoon.

And finally, why didn’t the president demand an apology? Was he not alarmed that his national security adviser is cracking Jewish-merchant jokes?

US Trains...Terrorists?

Pamela of AtlasShrugs has the right headline:

"Moderate" Muslim US-trained Police Officer Murders IDF Soldier Sitting in his Car

You have been following my Dayton-Jones training series, yes?

Jones: Get Ready for Shock

Reported:

National Security Adviser Gen. Jim Jones tells USA Today that Americans will be shocked by details yet to emerge in the declassified intelligence report on Detroit airline-bombing suspect Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab that President Barack Obama plans to release today

Wait until the report on his joint mission with Dayton to subvert Israel's security with his training of PA personnel comes out.

(Do a search here using "Jones", "Dayton", "security" or try this for a start)

US Trains Pal. Terrorists It Seems

I'm not surprised to have been alerted to this piece by Rachel Ehrenfeld where she writes:

The scheme behind the U.S. military initiative to organize and train the PA military forces is that these “new men” would help Abbas defeat Hamas. However, Abbas had already indicated that he “has agreed in principle to form a joint security force with …Hamas.” This does not seem to phase Dayton, who insists that the “new men,” are on a mission to "create a Palestinian state."

Abu Yusef, a member of the PA’s Chairman own security unit - Force 17, has an unambiguous view of the American military training of the Palestinians: “The operations of the Palestinian resistance would [not] have been so successful and "would not have killed more than 1,000 Israelis since 2000, and defeated the Israelis in Gaza without [American military] trainings,” he boasted in an interview in August 2007. "All the methods and techniques that we studied in these trainings, we applied them against the Israelis," he said.

Abu Yusef explained that the American training helped the Palestinian forces to better snipe “at Israeli settlers and soldiers.” The special intelligence training they received from the U.S. instructors helped them “collect information on the movements of soldiers and settlers… the best timing to infiltrate our bombers inside Israel.” Abu Yusef specified: “We used weapons and we produced explosives, and of course the trainings we received from the Americans and the Europeans were a great help to the resistance."

If the past is of any indication, then the “new men” would join thousands of already well-trained and well-equipped Palestinians whose main goal remained to fight Israel. Yet, the U.S. is determined to expedite the training.

I have blogged multiple times (here, and here, and here and here) on the 'Dayton Force' and the Jones Plan and the Cavalucci Mess.

Will anybody in the Netanyahu administration take notice?


(Kippah tip: Pam Geller)

I Don't Want to Keep Up with This Jones

Of all the cockamaney ideas!

Retired Marine General James Jones was selected by President-elect Barack Obama to become his National Security Adviser.

He's for deployment of international forces to the Palestinian territories.

It's reported that:-

...he argued against having Israel keep full security responsibility for the West Bank after an agreement is reached. Jones proposed that an interim international force led by NATO would take over until Palestinian forces are prepared to maintain security.

...“The idea wasn’t to give over all security issues to NATO, but rather to reassure Israelis that their security concerns would be taken care of even after withdrawal,” said an Israeli official who was briefed on Jones’s work.

Still, Israelis saw the proposal as a warning signal and turned it down immediately...the Jerusalem Post on December 2 quoted an unnamed senior IDF officer calling Jones’s idea of deploying NATO forces to the West Bank “very bad,” arguing that “NATO will not want to endanger its soldiers on behalf of Israeli citizens.”

...Jones himself did not go back to the idea in a lengthy interview he gave last month to “Inside the Pentagon” — a professional newsletter tracking the business and politics of the defense establishment. Jones did, however, stress in the interview the need for the next administration to build on the success of his work in Jenin, saying, “nothing is more important” than continuing to lay the groundwork for a two-state solution.

See here for more details.

Israel has had enough outside interference. The country is too small for an interventionist force. Bad idea.

So, the PA Police Gambit Didn't Work?

For those following my posts on this aspect of Israel's security by which we allow US military "experts" train the PA police and then claim everything is okay (see these previous posts 1, 2, 3, 4), then you weren't surpised whne reading this:-


Candidate for U.S. security adviser wants NATO force in West Bank

General James Jones, whom U.S. President-elect Barack Obama is widely expected to tap as his national security adviser, supports the deployment of an international force in the West Bank instead of the Israel Defense Forces. He also opposes Israel's demand to retain extensive security control over the territories even after a Palestinian state is established.

Jones served as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's special envoy for Israeli-Palestinian security issues over the past year. He was tasked in particular with formulating security arrangements between Israel and the future Palestinian state.

Jones is expected to play a key role in the Obama administration. According to U.S. press reports, he will be as strong as Henry Kissinger, the all-powerful national security adviser to President Richard Nixon...

...In response to Israel's claim that the Palestinians cannot be trusted with responsibility for security, Jones, a former NATO commander, proposed a NATO-based international force that would later transfer control to the Palestinians.