Print'Obama Sides with the Palestinians' - Again
So I read the headline on Drudge Report just moments after President Obama delivered his second Middle East (and hundredth campaign) speech on Thursday. Of course, this should be no surprise to anyone paying attention to Obama's Mideast policy over the past two and a half years. Nor should it be a surprise to anyone who cared about this issue enough to investigate Obama-the-candidate in the lead-up to the election. It was clear then, and remains unquestionable today, that Obama is simply the most anti-Israel U.S. president (and that includes Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush) in history.
On the FoxNews.com homepage, the headline was slightly different: "Obama Shocker: Backs Palestinians, Tells Israel to Pull Back to '67 Borders." I respectfully disagree -- this was as predictable as the sun rising every morning and setting every evening. But what is not clear is whether or not American Jews will interpret Obama's speech as insightfully as those reporting on it from the right side of the aisle. For the majority of American Jews are liberal, do not take kindly to the reporting of Fox News and The Drudge Report, and are ill-informed on the impact of Obama's words and actions vis-à-vis Israel's survival.
Obama and his advisors and speech writers are no dummies. They ensured that they threw in enough carrots to cover up Obama's long-term plans for a two-state solution. Give this guy another four years and you can be sure that the gloves come off and any U.S. support for Israel at the U.N. is gone, a two-state plan will be forced on Israel, and another U.S. ally is thrown permanently (or at least until Obama is out of the White House) under the bus.
In his speech, Obama segued from discussions of the Arab Spring and related Mideast issues to the Palestinian/Israeli peace process with the following line: "Let me conclude by talking about another cornerstone of our approach to the region, and that relates to the pursuit of peace." In a nutshell, the cornerstone of Obama's approach to the region is to create peace between Israel and the Palestinians, and everything else will just fall into place. This lack of peace is the cause of all of the region's problems. And this has been the ideological driver of this administration's foreign policy in the area. It is not only that Obama wants to go down in history as accomplishing the achievement of which none of his predecessors were capable. Obama truly believes the words he spoke during his campaign that "[t]his is the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal."
Obama, the great healer, has every intention of throwing Israel under the bus since that pesky little country is preventing him from achieving the idolatry of the world's populations (and justification for the Nobel Peace Prize prematurely bestowed upon him). But he cannot do so while working toward a second term. So in one breath, he proposed that Israel pull back to the '67 borders, while in another, he suggested that Israel's borders must be defensible. He then mentioned contiguous Palestinian borders, ignoring the fact that it would be impossible for Israel's borders to then remain contiguous or defensible.
Obama also described Palestinians "suffering the humiliation of occupation" and stated that "[t]he dream of a Jewish and democratic state cannot be fulfilled with permanent occupation." These statements effectually delegitimize the legitimate Israeli claim to Judea and Samaria, and yet, in the next breath, Obama stated that "[f]or the Palestinians, efforts to delegitimize Israel will end in failure." Once again, only the great One has this special gift of speaking out of both sides of his mouth while the masses fawn at every last word.
One of my favorite lines of the speech was when Obama stated that "[t]he international community is tired of an endless process that never produces an outcome." Here, it is clear that it is Obama and his cronies who are tired of the process. And it is no wonder, since they made it the cornerstone of the administration's Mideast policy without any clue whatsoever as to the history of the region and its peoples or the real possibilities of achieving this goal.
The possibility of four more years of Obama is a real issue for American Jews to consider. The Wall Street Journal published an article Thursday entitled "Jewish Donors Warn Obama on Israel." The article discussed the risks of Obama losing financial support due to his positions on Israel. And it is clear that Obama's speech today was the first step in his campaign to address that concern. Tackling the concerns of one donor who suggested that Obama "be 'extremely proactive' in countering the perception in the Jewish community that Mr. Obama is too critical of Israel," Obama threw out this line:
[O]ur friendship [with Israel] is rooted deeply in a shared history and shared values. Our commitment to Israel's security is unshakeable. And we will stand against attempts to single it out for criticism in international forums.
Of course, that sentence was followed with a "but" stating that Israel "must act boldly to advance a lasting peace." There was no mention of the numerous peace offers, land concessions, and failed attempts by Israel to reach an agreement in prior negotiations.
According to the WSJ article, Obama has started his full court press with the Jewish community by reaching out to Penny Pritzker, his 2008 national finance chairwoman, to talk with Jewish leaders. Ms. Pritzker stated that "I do think there's an education job to be done, because there's lots of myths that abound and misunderstandings of the administration's record. [...] The campaign is aggressively getting the information out there."
There they go again. Those ignorant Americans just cannot seem to get the facts right. They have misunderstood the well-intentioned and pro-Israel Obama administration, and they need to be educated -- through what I would label a "misinformation" campaign consistent with Obama to date.
The scary part of the article was the suggestion by one Jewish Obama fundraiser "that most Jewish voters [are] concerned about many issues, not just Israel." And clearly that is the case because 78% of them voted for the man who hung out with domestic terrorists, black liberation theologists, and anti-Semites, and who had Palestinians from the West Bank making campaign calls for him just prior to the 2008 election. In support of this notion, the article includes a reference to former Mayor Ed Koch, who was considering voting for a Republican in 2012, apparently feeling that Obama was "hostile to Israel," but who changed his mind when he realized that the House proposed privatizing Medicare for people under age 55. Now there's a Jew with his priorities exactly where 78% of his fellow American Jews are -- focusing on preserving socialism rather than Israel's survival.
Obama will be speaking before the pro-Israel group AIPAC on Sunday. Three years ago, candidate Obama also spoke before thousands of American Jews at the annual AIPAC conference and made the pledge that Jerusalem would remain undivided. Within 24 hours, in the face of Muslim backlash, Obama retreated from that promise. American Jews must not forget that again and again, Obama sides with the Palestinians.
