President Obama’s May 19th speech on the Middle East sounded like something a high-schooler would have given to win a prize in a politically correct oration contest. It showed a total lack of knowledge of the historic reality of the area for the last hundred years. It was full of empty clichés about “democracy.” What he could have and should have told the Arab countries is that, after 63 years, it was time to end their boycott and hostility toward Israel and establish normal diplomatic relations with the Jewish state. He certainly should have expected Iraq, liberated from despotism by America, to establish normal diplomatic relations with Israel.
Instead, he pledged to throw huge sums of money at Tunisia and Egypt in order to help them achieve a democratic government and economic prosperity. He could have cited tiny Israel as a nation in the area that was able to achieve economic prosperity with very little natural resources.
But what shocked many Americans, and particularly friends of Israel, is when he suggested that Israel start the negotiations for peace with its enemies by first agreeing to retreat to its pre-1967 borders. That would mean dividing Jerusalem into two parts, Israeli and Palestinian. The President also expected Israel to help solve the Palestinian refugee problem by accepting millions of descendants of those Palestinians who fled the Holy Land in 1948, thus destroying Israel as a Jewish state. Obama also said that the Palestinian state must be contiguous, meaning that Israel would have to cut itself up to accommodate the Palestinian state comprised of both the West Bank and Gaza. Such an Israel would be totally indefensible. In short the President of the United States was asking Israel to commit suicide.
He did not ask the Arabs to give up their dreams of destroying Israel. He did not ask Lebanon to give up its state of war against their southern neighbor. He did not even tell the Egyptians that it was important for them to maintain their peace treaty with Israel if they expected further American help. Instead, he accepted the status quo as unchangeable, even though his entire political career has been devoted to “hope and change.“ Nor did he tell the Muslim countries to stop killing Christians. He just rattled on about religious tolerance and freedom as if just saying the words would bring about religious tolerance and freedom.
But it was the Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, who brought Obama back down to earth. He was scheduled to confer with Obama at the White House on the very next day after the speech, and the Israeli statesman took the opportunity not only to give Obama a lesson in geography and history but also inform the millions of Americans who would be watching the meeting.
There was much speculation on what that meeting would be like since many remembered how insultingly Netanyahu was treated by Obama in November 2009 when, according to reporter Caroline Glick, Netanyahu was “brought into the White House in an unmarked van in the middle of the night rather than greeted like a friend at the front door, was forbidden to have his picture taken with the President, and was forced to leave the White House alone, through a side exit, and ordered to keep the contents of the meeting with the President secret.” That was Obama at the height of his arrogance and belief that he could treat an ally like a pariah and that his Jewish voters would continue to support him in 2012.
When former UN ambassador John Bolton listened to the first speech Obama gave to the United Nations, he told Glenn Beck, “this is the most radical anti-Israel speech I can recall any president making … I have to say I was very shaken by this speech.”
But this time the meeting was cordial, and Obama listened intently to what Netanyahu had to say: that going back to the 1967 borders was impossible because of the many changes that had taken place on the ground since then. He also told the President that Israel would not negotiate with Hamas, which was now a part of the Palestinian government, since Hamas’s goal is the destruction of Israel, and lastly that there was no way that Israel could accept the millions of grandchildren of the Arab refugees who fled Palestine in 1948 when the Arab armies invaded the newly created state of Israel in their attempt to throw the Jews into the sea.
That meeting, and Netanyahu’s statement, left the impression that Obama was shown to be ignorant of the salient facts about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But he made his comeback at the AIPAC (American Israeli Public Affairs Committee) meeting held on Sunday, May 22nd, even though Morton Klein, president of the Zionist Organization of America, wrote an open letter to AIPAC, calling on it to cancel a scheduled address by Obama to the Jewish lobby group on Sunday.
As expected, Obama used the occasion to solidify his Jewish vote by virtually agreeing with everything Netanyahu said by simply using clever semantic juggling, yet still calling for a contiguous Palestinian state, unarmed, living in peace with Israel. He strongly reiterated America’s commitment to defend Israel. And judging from the applause he received, it is doubtful that much of the 78 percent of the Jewish vote he got in 2008 will desert him. Indeed, by speaking at AIPAC, Obama showed how good a politician he has become since 2009 when he treated Netanyahu like a pariah.
Obama bowed to the king of Saudi Arabia and other heads of state, but kicked the Prime Minister of Israel in the pants. And in his AIPAC speech he spoke of the Palestinians and Israelis as moral equivalents. Yet, according to Jerusalem Post reporter Caroline Glick:
Virulent, Nazi-style Jew hatred and dehumanization has become for the Palestinians, as for the Germans before them, the central unifying theme of society…. Palestinians teach, preach, write and paint in praise of genocide.
Despite all of this, and the lack of ability of most Americans to understand the subtlety of what comes out of the mouth of Barack Hussein Obama, one must not underestimate Obama’s ability to win a second term, although it will probably be the economy and not his Middle East policy that will determine the outcome.
Let’s hope that what happened on Sunday, in Spain will happen in the U.S. in November 2012. Judging from the humiliating defeat the Socialists in Spain suffered on May 22nd in local and regional elections, it is the economy that played the major role in the conservatives’ victories. How Obama overcomes his “it’s the economy, stupid” handicap will be seen in the coming campaign.
So why was Obama so heavily supported by the Jewish vote in 2008, when it was already known that throughout his life, Obama had been close friends with numerous virulent anti-Semites: Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayers, Khalid al-Mansour, Rashid Khalidi, and others. They voted for him because he was a Democrat.
At Occidental College,Obama’s friends were hardly pro-Israel. He wrote in his autobiography, Dreams from My Father: “To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students, the foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets…. we discussed neocolonialism, Franz Fanon, Eurocentrism and patriarchy.”
Not a Zionist among them. In fact these are groups who see Zionism as a form of Western colonialism.
In Chicago, Obama chose to attend Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s Trinity United Church of Christ, where he and Michelle were married and where his children were baptized. According to The New Republic of March 2007, Wright was “a former Muslim and black nationalist.” Wright awarded the anti-Semitic head of the Black Muslim sect, Louis Farrakhan, the church’s award. This is the church that Obama attended for 20 years, listening to Wright’s harangues against Israel and the United States. It is in that church that Wright was taped preaching in a loud voice, “God damn America.”
Knowing what we now know about Obama’s past associations with anti-Semites, it makes Obama’s magical ability to be a political chamelion ever so much more remarkable. At the AIPAC meeting he pulled all the heartstrings of that Jewish, largely Democrat, audience. He spoke of his visit to the Western Wall in Jerusalem where he said a prayer and placed a note in one of the wall’s crevices. He actually said it with a straight face. That certainly convinced most of the people in that audience that Obama would have their votes. How many Republican politicians have done what Obama did and talked about it? In fact, Sarah Palin did exactly that and mentioned it only in passing with a smile in a short interview.
In short, whatever damage may have been inflicted on Obama’s image by Netanyahu on Friday was superbly repaired by Obama on Sunday. This man does more than lie. He is the lie.
