Post-American Presidency (19 page)

Priorities are priorities.

“THE MOST RADICAL ANTI-ISRAEL SPEECH I CAN RECALL ANY PRESIDENT MAKING”

Cozying up to Hamas domestically and internationally, and leaving a pro-Israel position unfilled for months, were the least of it.

The Obama administration from its first days began to press Israel for concessions, while making no corresponding demands upon the Palestinians. Obama demanded that Israelis withdraw from “settlements”—which were in reality often established communities—in “occupied Palestinian territory.” No other president had ever made such harsh demands. He never took note of the fact that the “Palestinian territory” in question was ruled by Jordan from 1948 to 1967, during which time there was never a single complaint from Palestinians about “occupation.”

The “settlements,” moreover, were on land to which Israel had a perfectly legitimate historical and legal claim. “Settler” was a derogatory term for a Jew in the Jewish homeland. But Obama made the “settlements” the latest concession that the Israelis had to make for a promise of peace with the Palestinians that never seemed to materialize after earlier territorial concessions in the Sinai and Gaza and elsewhere.

Thus, on September 23, 2009, Barack Obama declared at the UN: “We continue to emphasize that America does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements.” He called for the establishment of a “viable, independent Palestinian state with contiguous territory that ends the occupation that began in 1967, and realizes the potential of the Palestinian people.”
⁶⁰

When, three weeks later, not much progress had been made on this front, it was reported that officials leaked the news that Obama was “disgusted” with Israel for not moving more quickly to dismantle the settlements.
⁶¹
A few weeks after this, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
took a somewhat softer line than that of her boss when she praised Israeli concessions on the construction of new settlements as “unprecedented.”
⁶²
By contrast, Obama, like the Palestinians, had never publicly acknowledged that Israel had taken any steps toward peace at all.

Former UN ambassador John Bolton pointed out that Obama didn’t say that “new Israeli settlements” were illegitimate, but that “continued Israeli settlements” were illegitimate and unacceptable. Said Bolton: “That calls into question in my mind all Israeli settlements.”

And a “contiguous” Palestinian state would cut Israel in two. Bolton commented: “Do you think that matters to the Palestinians? That is the kind of approach to an issue that is attempting to decide the outcome to the negotiations, before the negotiations, that’s why I think that the Israelis should be worried. He’s laid it out where he wants it to end up.”

Bolton added: “The important thing is, when you have the Palestinians in as weak a position as they are now, and to have Barack Obama be their lawyer, in effect, puts them in a very strong bargaining place.” And Obama, said Bolton, has “made it very clear how much he wants to do through the UN.” How much? “An overwhelming percentage of our policy.”
⁶³

Around the same time, the results of Obama’s policies toward Israel began to appear.

STRANGE FRUIT

Obama’s policies toward Israel began to bear poisonous fruit around the same time that Jones declared that the United States wanted to give the Palestinians a state “without preconditions.”

Late in September 2009, an Israeli was shot in his car while traveling north of Jerusalem. A local Israeli leader, Avi Roeh, commented:
“This attack is a direct result of the removal of roadblocks. It’s only by some miracle that the outcome of these attacks has been no worse than injuries, but you cannot base security policies on miracles.”
⁶⁴

Maybe Israelis really were expecting miracles in September 2009, when the Israeli army began removing one hundred roadblocks in Judea and Samaria.
The
Jerusalem Post
said this was “an effort to make life easier for Palestinians.”
⁶⁵
They were all gone by the week before the shooting took place north of Jerusalem.

The official line was that the roadblock removal wasn’t related to Obama envoy George Mitchell’s meeting with Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu, which took place around the same time, but the
Post
said, “While Israeli sources said there was no direct link with Mitchell’s visit, they added there was an indirect connection because an improved West Bank economy was good for the diplomatic process.”

This attempt to show goodwill was met only with increased pressure on Israel from the United States. The same day that the shooting took place, U.S. assistant secretary of state Michael Posner said that Israel should investigate war-crimes charges that the Palestinians (in reality the world’s worst human-rights violators) had made in the UN Human Rights Council’s Goldstone Report, prepared by the head of the UN fact finding mission, Justice Richard Goldstone: “We encourage Israel to utilise appropriate domestic (judicial) review and meaningful accountability mechanisms to investigate and follow-up on credible allegations. If undertaken properly and fairly, these reviews can serve as important confidence-building measures that will support the larger essential objective which is a shared quest for justice and lasting peace.”
⁶⁶

So the United States had put itself into the position of pressuring Israel to plead guilty to something it did not do, so as to “build confidence” with the jihadis in Gaza.

That same day, at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, Anne
Bayefsky delivered a statement on behalf of both the Touro Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust and the Hudson Institute. She said: “The Goldstone mission will go down in history as the 21st century’s equivalent to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion—a notorious work of fiction which spun a conspiratorial web of deceit and distortion that has fueled hatred of Jews ever since. At its core, the Goldstone report repeats the ancient blood libel against the Jewish people—the allegation of bloodthirsty Jews intent on butchering the innocent.”
⁶⁷

It came as no surprise, then, in October 2009, when the secretary-general of the OIC, Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, revealed that his organization was the driving force behind the Goldstone Report. Speaking of the Goldstone Report in an interview with Al-Jazeera, Ihsanoglu said: “What I would like to put on record is that the OIC was the initiator of this process.” He explained that the whole idea of such a report was hatched during a meeting of the OIC’s executive committee at the time of the Israeli defensive incursion into Gaza of January 2009.
⁶⁸

The OIC is one of the principal enemies of the freedom of speech internationally today—and it is no friend of Israel. On November 1, 2009, the fifty-seven-member organization issued a stern warning to Israel over unrest at Jerusalem’s Temple Mount that had broken out in October: “Al-Aqsa represents the red line… Causing any harm to this mosque will have dangerous consequences”—although the idea that Israel had any plans to tamper with the Al-Aqsa was overheated rumor in the first place. The OIC’s communiqué also called for the creation of a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital, action by the UN Security Council against Jewish settlements in Jerusalem and elsewhere, and for an end to Israel’s “policy of ethnic cleansing.”
⁶⁹

THE NEW GOAL OF AMERICAN POLICY

After all this it came as no surprise in November 2009 when William J. Burns, the State Department’s undersecretary for political affairs, announced: “Our goal in the region is clear: two states living side by side in peace and security; a Jewish state of Israel, with which America retains unbreakable bonds, and with true security for all Israelis; and a viable, independent Palestinian state with contiguous territory that ends the occupation that began in 1967, that ends the daily humiliations of Palestinians under occupation, and that realizes the full and remarkable potential of the Palestinian people.”

How would all this be accomplished? Why, by pressuring the Israelis for more concessions, of course. “We do not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements,” declared Burns. “We consider the Israeli offer to restrain settlement activity to be a potentially important step, but it obviously falls short of the continuing Roadmap obligation for a full settlement freeze.”
⁷⁰

And what would the Palestinians have to do in order to get free from these “daily humiliations” and claim their “viable, independent” state “with contiguous territory”? Nothing at all. True to the continued pattern of the Obama administration, he made no demands upon the Palestinians at all.

The Palestinians seemed to be well aware of this, and reacted by making no secret of their ultimate intentions. After all, what did they have to lose? Palestinian Authority prime minister Salam Fayad met in August 2009 with over fifty senators and representatives, telling them that the new Palestinian state would be an Islamic state, devoted to “developing and implementing programs of Shari’a education as derived from the science of the Holy Qur’an and Prophet’s heritage.”
⁷¹

A Palestinian Islamic state would not be a democracy, it would be Gaza tenfold, a terror state—and Obama wanted to set it up.

Significantly, in September 2009 on the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashana, Obama sent greetings—to Muslims on the occasion of the Eid al-Fitr holiday marking the end of Ramadan. He sent Jews Rosh Hashana greetings also, including a veiled jab reflecting his acceptance of Palestinian propaganda: “Let’s reject the impulse to harden ourselves to others’ suffering.”
⁷²

Obama apparently thought that the trouble between Israel and the Palestinians stemmed entirely from the alleged evils committed by Israel against the Palestinians; it mirrored his diagnosis of the causes of the conflict between the West and the Islamic world. At Cairo in June 2009, he identified several root causes of the Islamic world’s hatred of the West and America in particular; all were the West’s fault. It never seemed to enter his mind—much less influence his policy—that possibly Israel and the United States were facing foes who hated them for their own reasons, and were not just passively reacting to the evils perpetrated upon them by the Western powers.

And so he was determined to make the Israelis give, and give, and give, in exchange for nothing more than airy promises.

The Israelis began to notice—and to act. In July 2009, for the first time in decades, there was an anti-U.S., pro-Israel rally in the heart of Jerusalem. Knesset member Yaakov Katz, chairman of the National Union party, explained: “Not since the days of Kissinger has there been such a protest against American policies. The pressure that Barack Hussein Obama is exerting against us to simply stop growing and stop living will not work.”
⁷³

But Obama’s antipathy toward Israel has been a disaster for the Jewish state. With great speed during Obama’s first months as president, Israel became more and more isolated in an increasingly hostile
world—a world that was leaning toward capitulating to an OIC-driven UN.

But nothing was more dangerous, reckless, and lethal than Obama’s tacit sanction of Iran’s nuclear program. It changed the balance of power and the course of human events.

THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION SEEMED
INTENT IN SO MANY WAYS ON DISMAYING AMERICA’S
FRIENDS AND ENCOURAGING OUR ENEMIES. IN A
breathtaking surrender to Russia in August 2009, Obama abandoned our allies Poland and the Czech Republic, scrapping their missile-defense shield.

Ostensibly Obama made a deal with Russia: he would scrap the missile-defense plans for Eastern Europe in exchange for Russian help in blocking Iran’s quest for nuclear weapons.
¹
With his attempts to bring the Iranians to the negotiating table having already failed, Obama certainly needed help with Iran. But he was effectively exchanging a reality (the missile-defense shield) for a hope (the possibility that the Russians would be able to stop Iran from gaining nuclear weapons, or would even care to if they could).

It was stunning in its betrayal of good, reliable allies who had unfalteringly stood by us. The immediate effect was the weakening of American allies. Former United Nations ambassador John Bolton commented: “I think this is a near catastrophe for American relations with Eastern European countries and many in NATO. It was the kind of unilateral decision that the Bush administration was always criticized for, and I think the clear winners are in Russia and Iran.”
²

Even Obama’s old presidential rival John McCain was unhappy with the decision: “Given the serious and growing threats posed by Iran’s missile and nuclear programs, now is the time when we should look to strengthen our defenses, and those of our allies. Missile defense in Europe has been a key component of this approach. I believe the decision to abandon it unilaterally is seriously misguided. This decision calls into question security and diplomatic commitments the United States has made to Poland and the Czech Republic and has the potential to undermine perceived American leadership in Eastern Europe.”
³

BETRAYING HONDURAS

“Coup” was the word du jour in June and July 2009, when the Obama administration at its most Orwellian used it to define, or defame, the healthy functioning of democracy in Honduras.

Superficially, it did look like a coup. Honduran president Manuel Zelaya was rudely awakened in the middle of the night: “I was awakened by shots, and the yells of my guards, who resisted for about 20 minutes. I came out in my pajamas, I’m still in my pajamas.… When (the soldiers) came in, they pointed their guns at me and told me they would shoot if I didn’t put down my cellphone.” Zelaya put it down. The soldiers, still holding their guns on him, then exiled him from the country.
⁴