WarSclerotic

Make the Democrats Pay for Appeasement | First Things.

Softer tone coming from Washington.

By HERB KEINON
16/03/2010 20:18

Clinton reaffirms “unshakable bond” in first public sign crisis winding down.
Talkbacks (178)

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who blasted Israel on Friday and kept alive a crisis in relations triggered by last week’s announcement of new housing in Ramat Shlomo, reiterated US support for Israel on Tuesday in the first public signs that the crisis was winding down.

Asked at a Washington press conference with Irish Foreign Minister Micheal Martin whether this was the worst Israeli-US relations had been in 35 years, Clinton said, “I don’t buy that. We have an absolute commitment to Israel’s security. We have a close, unshakable bond between the United States and Israel and between the American and Israeli people, who share common values and a commitment to a democratic future for the world.”

Clinton said that both countries were also committed to a two-state solution.

“But that doesn’t mean that we are going to agree. We don’t agree with any of our international partners on everything,” she said.

Just four days after a blistering phone conversation with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, followed by television appearances in which she said the announcement of plans to build in Ramat Shlomo while Vice President Joe Biden was in Israel was an insult not only to Biden but to the US, Clinton reiterated US “dismay and disappointment” at that announcement.

She also said the US was “engaged in very active consultations with the Israelis over steps that we think would demonstrate the requisite commitment to the process.”

Clinton, in Friday’s conversation with Netanyahu, reportedly asked that he cancel the Ramat Shlomo project, make gestures to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to get him to agree again to enter proximity talks, and agree that the “core” issues be discussed during those talks.

Israel’s position before this was that these talks should only deal with technical matters needed to get into direct negotiations, not core issues such as borders, security, Jerusalem and refugees.

Netanyahu is widely expected to agree to parts of these demands, but not all of them. A likely scenario is that he would make an announcement that there would be no more “surprises” like the one that greeted Biden last week, and that Israel would agree that all the core issues be discussed in the proximity talks.

The Prime Minister’s Office, eager to put an end to the public spat with the US, jumped on Clinton’s remarks on Tuesday, issuing a statement saying it appreciated Clinton’s “warm words.”

The statement went on to address questions about Israel’s commitment to peace, saying Israel had proved its commitment over the last year through both words – such as Netanyahu’s speech at Bar-Ilan University in which he accepted a two-state solution – and actions, such as the housing-start moratorium in the West bank.

The statements then blamed the Palestinians for holding up the diplomatic process, saying the PA had placed unprecedented preconditions on starting talks, had led the campaign of delegitimizing Israel around the world, and had continued to incite hatred and violence.

Clinton, meanwhile, said that Middle East envoy George Mitchell – who postponed a visit this week – would return soon to the region.

“We’ll see what the next days hold, and we’re looking forward to Sen. Mitchell returning to the region and beginning the proximity talks,” she said.

The US Embassy in Tel Aviv said that Mitchell, who was originally slated to meet Netanyahu on Wednesday, had postponed his visit because of “logistical reasons” and the need to hold meetings in Washington before going to a meeting of the Quartet Thursday in Moscow.

Netanyahu hopes to have meetings next week with senior US administration officials, either Clinton or Biden. Netanyahu is scheduled to speak Monday evening at the annual American Israel Public Affairs Committee policy conference in Washington during a brief stopover in the US.

He is also expected to stop on the way home in Brussels for meetings with key EU officials.

One of those officials, EU foreign relations chief Catherine Ashton, is scheduled to arrive in Israel Wednesday for a one-day visit. Her trip comes just days after she sharply criticized Israel for the Ramat Shlomo announcement, and then later hinted broadly that the EU could use the prospects of an upgrade with Israel as leverage.

Ashton is scheduled to travel to the Gaza Strip, making her the highest-level international official to go there from Israel in months. Ashton – along with UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who is scheduled to arrive on Friday – received permission to visit Gaza from Israel, but pledged not to meet Hamas representatives.

Ashton will be accompanied by UN officials on her visit, which will be her first to Israel since taking over her post in December. Officials in Jerusalem view this as an important opportunity to present the Israeli perspective to someone who has little in the way of diplomatic experience or a track record with the country.

In addition to going to Gaza, Ashton – on a regional tour that has also taken her to Egypt, Lebanon and Syria – is scheduled to meet Abbas and PA Prime Minister Salam Fayyad.

On the Israeli side, she will meet Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, Netanyahu and President Shimon Peres.

Peres, meanwhile, voiced muted criticism of Netanyahu on Tuesday, saying at a memorial ceremony in honor of late prime ministers and presidents of Israel that “we cannot afford to unravel the delicate fabric of friendship with the United States.”

“We must develop friendships with other nations, especially with the United States, to ensure political backing in our hour of need and military support against the dangers that face us,” he said. “We must make our supreme efforts not to stand alone; to recruit the good in people, and to extract the best in them.”

NTI: Global Security Newswire – Gaps Seen in Israeli Missile Defenses.

Potential gaps in Israel’s layered missile and rocket defenses could leave the nation’s civilian population vulnerable during an attack, United Press International reported Monday (see GSN, July 16, 2009).

The U.S.-backed Arrow 2 long-range missile interceptor system has never been tried in conflict while “David’s Sling” technology for use against medium-range threats could need another two years to become operational.

A combined missile and rocket strike by Iran and maybe Syria, along with the organizations Hamas and Hezbollah, could be too much for the Israeli air force to handle, according to some analysts.

The Lebanon-based Hezbollah launched roughly 4,000 rockets into Israel during their 2006 conflict. The group is now believed to hold about 45,000 rockets, which could reach much of the country, including Tel Aviv and the Dimona nuclear reactor.

Meanwhile, recent information from Rafael Advanced Weapons Systems has also suggested Jerusalem’s new Iron Dome system, developed to combat rockets launched by rival entities, could take 30 seconds to respond to a incoming short-range rocket with an travel time of 15 seconds.

These potential flaws in the missile and rocket shield could permit an estimated 8,000 civilian casualties if Israel is under attack, according to one analysis (United Press International, March 15).

Judith Miller: Stop the clash between U.S. and Israel | Washington Examiner.

By: Judith Miller
Manhattan Moment
March 17, 2010

There’s never a good time for a crisis between allies as close as the United States and Israel. But this is a particularly unfortunate moment for such a clash.

The long-anticipated “proximity” talks between Israel and the Palestine Authority were scheduled to start within days. Now they’re on hold. Israel’s American lobby group, AIPAC, is set to open its annual meeting in Washington this Sunday. Now who knows who’ll show up?

President Mubarak of Egypt, a critical player in the moderate Arab camp which has made peace with Israel, was photographed today from a hospital in Germany having undergone ostensible gall bladder surgery, looking awful. Could Egypt be on the verge of a destabilizing change of regimes? And the Obama administration is struggling to persuade its allies to support tougher sanctions against Iran to thwart Teheran’s nuclear ambitions.

Message to all sides: Enough already. Everyone needs to calm down, push the pause button, and diffuse a potentially explosive situation.

Much is at stake. “Spoilers” on all sides seem determined to make a bad situation worse. Consider the Palestinians. Ignoring the potentially incendiary consequences, they staged on Monday a “day of rage.” as militant Hamas called it.

Thousands turned out in Gaza to protest the rededication of a synagogue not far from the Al-Aqsa mosque, Islam’s third holiest site. Even the Palestine Authority on the West Bank condemned the re-opening of the Hurva synagogue, twice-destroyed in Arab-Israeli violence.

Daniel C Kurtzer, a vocal critic of continued Israeli settlement activity on occupied Arab land, called the Palestinian condemnation “ridiculous.” “Holy places are holy and should be respected by all sides,” he said.

Ditto the Palestine Authority’s decision last week to dedicate a square in the West Bank town of El Bireh in the name of Dalal Mughrabi, a 19-year old woman who killed 38 people, 13 of them children, in a 1978 terrorist attack. “The veneration of terrorists says something unsettling about Palestinian society,” wrote Richard Cohen, a columnist for the Washington Post.

Israel, too, needs to make amends for its ill-timed, ill-conceived decision to build 1600 new housing units, even if they are meant to be built in the Jewish part of East Jerusalem. According to the Israeli paper Ha’aretz, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton listed several initiatives that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu could take to repair the damage and stop trying to “dance at two weddings,” as an Israeli commentator put it.

First, plans for the housing can at the very least be put on hold. Israel, moreover, could agree to permit the proximity talks to deal with substantive, rather than just procedural issues, which Israel has been resisting. At finally, as Daily News publisher Mort Zuckerman suggested in an op-ed in his paper, Bibi could fire the Interior Minister who announced the new housing, either an act of incompetence or that of a spoiler.

This latest “crisis” needs perspective. This is not the first or only moment of tension between Israel and the U.S. Consider President Eisenhower’s pressure on Israel in 1957 to withdraw from territory captured in the Suez campaign, or the “reassessment” of U.S.-Israeli relations after the 1973 war when Israel resisted American demands, or the 1991 show-down when James Baker publicly gave then Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir the White House telephone number, saying he should call when he was “serious about peace.”

President Obama, too, needs to do far more to allay Israel’s widespread, intense suspicion of him and his motives. Israelis simply do not trust him, and that bodes ill for peace with the Arabs. They note that he has never spoken as harshly to an Iranian or Syrian leader as he has to an ostensible friend.

They deeply resent his speech in Cairo which likened Palestinian suffering to that of Jews in the Holocaust, and they note that a president who has traveled the globe since his inauguration has still not found time to visit Israel. When he wanted to repair the coldness that had set in, he sent Joe Biden.

Judith Miller is a Manhattan Institute senior fellow and a City Journal contributing editor.

Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columns/Manhattan-Moment/Judith-Miller-Stop-the-clash-between-US-and-Israel-88157232.html#ixzz0iRadbMJD

Report: Saudis may allow Israel’s use of air space.

Western security sources believe Saudi Arabia will readily let Israel use the country’s airspace to strike neighboring Iran if a war breaks out between the archenemies.

Prominent German news magazine SPIEGEL claimed in a Tuesday article that there exists a strong unity between Israel and Persian Gulf’s Arab states against Iran.

The periodical noted that Riyadh has gone so far with the idea as to speak openly to US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton of the potential need for a military option against the Islamic Republic.

SPIEGEl also cited Western intelligence agencies who believe that the Saudis would even open up their air space to Israeli jets for an attack on Iran.

This is while the United States has been reported intent on not allowing Israeli warplanes to fly over Iraq, it added.

The report also referred to an Arab League ministerial summit where they unanimously called on the Palestinians to start a new round of US-sponsored “proximity talks” with Israel.

Observers reiterate that SPIEGEl is greatly influenced by the Israeli regime and has previously published reports that were meant to serve as an Israeli propaganda campaign ore psychological warfare against the Islamic Republic.

It’s war! And Bam’s bidding to boot Bibi – NYPOST.com.

President Obama has ap parently adopted regime change as a goal — but his target is Israel.

He’s plainly out to unseat (or at least change) the government of Prime Minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu.

The latest move came yesterday, when Obama upped the pressure by canceling special envoy George Mitchell’s planned Jerusalem trip.

It all started with last week’s mess — when Vice President Joe Biden, in Israel, was hit by the surprise announcement of new Israeli construction in a disputed north Jerusalem neighborhood.

Since the Obama team has always sought to freeze all settlement growth, Biden felt blind-sided. The rest of his visit was consumed by Israeli damage control.

Netanyahu apologized, telling Biden the surprise was the work of a low-level official and promising to overhaul procedures to prevent any repeat.

Biden seemed mollified: As he left on Friday, he said he accepted Netanyahu’s apologies, and even praised the prime minister’s commitment to peace.

But top Obama officials soon showed they were ready to elevate the Israeli “slap in the face” into a major crisis between the two countries.

Later on Friday, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton read Bibi the riot act over the phone for 43 minutes — spelling out several conditions and concessions to the Palestinians.

In an apparent contradiction of Biden’s parting remarks in Israel, she yesterday described these actions as necessary for Israel to show its “commitment to peace.”

Among those terms: a complete cessation of construction in any disputed Jerusalem neighborhood — a concession no Israeli prime minister can make and remain in power.

If the Obama team had any interest in balancing its approach here, it would be making some stink over a Palestinian “slap in the face” that occurred during Biden’s visit to the region: the dedication of a public square in a Ramallah suburb to the memory of a female “martyr” who killed one American and 37 Israelis, including 12 children. But there has been no protest over this incitement to violence.

Meanwhile, Palestinian negotiators yesterday refused to commit to joining US-led “proximity talks” with Israel. And rioting in eastern Jerusalem turned violent. Many are calling for a third intifada.

Israeli critics of Netanyahu have used the crisis to attack the prime minister’s policies.

That heartens those Obama advisers who believe that no Arab-Israeli progress is possible until Netanyahu is unseated — or at least until he replaces his right-wing coalition partners with the dovish opposition leader, Tzipi Livni.

What now? Watch the moves at next week’s annual gathering of the America-Israel Public Affairs Committee:

* Bibi may offer some concessions along the lines suggested by Clinton. For now, though, he’s sticking to his guns.

* Biden may snub Netanyahu: The two agreed last week to a dinner in Washington to publicly bury the hatchet. If the veep cancels, it will signal that Obama isn’t appeased.

* In her AIPAC speech, Clinton will speak of America’s “unshakable” commitment to Israel’s security. But will she have a paragraph or two about Netanyahu’s commitment to peace, or hint at “disagreements among friends”?

Obama has fought Netanyahu from the start. In the first year of that conflict, Bibi’s poll numbers in Israel have climbed steadily, as Obama’s support in America has waned (albeit for other reasons). And US prestige has fallen across the Mideast.

Meanwhile, any hope of uniting the region to face the real danger — Iran’s rush to join the “nuclear club” — seems lost in the process.

The American Spectator : Blame Israel First.

So let’s see if I have this right.

The Israeli government announces plan to build 1,600 housing units in East Jerusalem and the Obama Administration springs into action sparing no effort to turn Israel into public enemy number one.

While still in Israel, Vice President Joe Biden said, “I condemn the decision by the government of Israel to advance planning for new housing units in East Jerusalem. We must build an atmosphere to support negotiations, not complicate them.”

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton read Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu the riot act over the phone. State Department representative P.J. Crowley, speaking on behalf of Mrs. Clinton, described the announcement as “a deeply negative signal about Israel’s approach to the bilateral relationship.” Crowley went on to say that Israel “needed to demonstrate not just through words but through specific actions that they are committed to this relationship and to the peace process.”

Committed to this relationship? Did Bibi take Hillary out to the movies only to ask her to go Dutch? As if that wasn’t enough, Clinton subsequently told MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell that the Israeli government’s announcement was “an insult to the United States.” To White House Senior Advisor David Axelrod, the proposal to build new housing in East Jerusalem wasn’t merely an insult. Axelrod told Tom Brokaw on NBC’s Meet the Press this past Sunday, “This was an affront, it was an insult but most importantly it undermined this very fragile effort to bring peace to that region.”

Amazing as it would seem, by all appearances the Obama Administration is angrier at Israel for building houses for Jews than it is at Iran for building a nuclear weapon intended to kill Jews. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is undoubtedly grinning from ear to ear. And why shouldn’t he? When he and the Mullahs crushed the streets protests after last year’s fraudulent Iranian elections; President Obama proclaimed it wasn’t America’s place to meddle.

Meanwhile, Israel doesn’t need to fire a single shot. It doesn’t even need to break ground. All Israel had to do was to merely announce plans to build new housing in East Jerusalem and the full force of the Vice President, the Secretary of State and the President’s top advisor came crashing down on the Jewish state like stone. All with President Obama’s blessing.

The Obama Administration (with Secretary Clinton taking the lead) is now apparently demanding that Israel not only cancel the housing project in Ramat Shlomo but has apparently made additional demands. They include Israel making a “substantial gesture” towards the Palestinians. This “substantial gesture” could mean the release of Palestinian prisoners, the lifting of roadblocks and/or transferring a greater portion of the West Bank to Palestinian control. Secretary Clinton is further demanding that any future negotiations with the Palestinians, even indirect ones, discuss matters such as Jewish settlements and the status of Jerusalem. Given that the Obama Administration has asked so much of Israel it begs this question. What has it asked of the Palestinian Authority?

Not much and if it has it certainly hasn’t done so publicly. After Vice President Biden’s visit with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Authority saw fit to dedicate a town square to Dalal Mughrabi. So who is Dalal Mughrabi?

On March 11, 1978, Mughrabi and eleven others under her command hijacked a bus traveling on Israel’s Coastal Highway near Tel Aviv and claimed the lives of 37 Israeli civilians including 12 children. An American photographer named Gail Rubin was also killed by Mughrabi’s forces prior to the hijacking.

Fatah claimed responsibility for the attack and exactly 32 years later it was the Fatah led Palestinian Authority which saw fit to honor Mughrabi for her actions. General Adnan Damiri, chief of the Palestinian Authority’s National Political Guidance Headquarters, addressed the gathering and stated, “This is part of our heritage that led to the peace process and agreements. There are not enough squares for all the martyrs we have.” Tayeb Abd Al-Rahim, a top spokesman for President Abbas, said Mughrabi and her accomplices “all went to Paradise as they turned their blood into a bridge over which we pass on the way to our freedom, independence and national liberation from the burden of the occupation.” The Palestinian Authority has in the past named schools and soccer tournaments after Mughrabi. Her actions have also been celebrated on Palestinian Authority state television.

To this day, it remains the deadliest terrorist attack on Israeli soil. For the Palestinian Authority to honor her would be akin to the Taliban in Afghanistan honoring Khalid Sheikh Mohammed for the attacks of September 11, 2001. Yet no condemnation of the Palestinian Authority was forthcoming from Vice President Biden. Secretary of State Clinton didn’t declare an honor bestowed upon a terrorist responsible for the murder of an American civilian to be an insult to the United States. Where, I ask, is the Hillary Clinton that stood side by side with Palestinian Media Watch to condemn the incitement of hatred and violence against Jews in Palestinian school textbooks? For his part, David Axelrod could not be moved to call the glorification of Mughrabi an affront, let alone an insult.

Apparently, honoring a person who murdered Israeli civilians in cold blood doesn’t complicate an atmosphere to support negotiations nor does it undermine the fragile effort to bring peace to the Middle East. Evidently, honoring a person who committed an act of terrorism doesn’t send a deeply negative signal about the Palestinian Authority’s approach to its bilateral relationship with the United States. A public condemnation of the Palestinian Authority for honoring Mughrabi would have been the honorable thing to do. Sadly, when it comes to holding the Palestinian Authority to account, there is no such honor within the Obama Administration.

Report: U.S. positioning ‘bunker-busters’ for possible Iran strike – Haaretz – Israel News.

		U.S. Air Force F-15s. (Getty Images)

The United States is transporting 387 “bunker-buster” bombs to its air base on the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean as part of preparations for a possible strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities, according to a report in Scotland’s Sunday Herald.

The U.S. government signed a contract in January with Superior Maritime Services to transport 10 ammunition containers to Diego Garcia from Concord, California. The shipment includes 195 smart, guided Blu-110 bombs and 192 Blu-117 2,000lb bombs.

Both types of bombs could be used against reinforced or underground facilities.

Neither the United States nor Israel have ruled out military action if diplomacy fails to resolve the long-running row over Iran’s disputed nuclear ambitions.

Contract details for the shipment were posted on an international tenders’ website by the U.S. Navy.

“They are gearing up totally for the destruction of Iran,” Dan Plesch, director of the Center for International Studies and Diplomacy at the University of London, told the Herald. “U.S. bombers are ready today to destroy 10,000 targets in Iran in a few hours.”

Plesch is the co-author of a recent study on U.S. preparations for an attack on Iran.

The final decision on whether to launch an attack would be in the hands of U.S. President Barack Obama. Obama may decide it would be better for the U.S. to strike instead of Israel, Plesch said.

“The U.S. is not publicizing the scale of these preparations to deter Iran, tending to make confrontation more likely,” he added. “The U.S….is using its forces as part of an overall strategy of shaping Iran’s actions.”

Diego Garcia is a British territory about 1,000 miles south of India and Sri Lanka. It is used as a U.S. military base as part of an agreement reached in 1971.

In the past, the British Defense Ministry has said that the U.S. would need permission to use Diego Garcia for offensive action. It has already been used in operations against Iraq during the 1991 and 2003 Gulf wars.

The U.S. Department of Defense did not respond to a request for a comment from the Sunday Herald

Ben Shapiro : Obama Wags the Dog with the Obama Intifada – Townhall.com.

President Obama’s health care plan is swirling the drain. Americans don’t like it — the latest Rasmussen poll has just 43 percent of Americans in favor, with 53 percent opposed — and that dislike has the Obama administration suggesting that polls don’t actually mirror the will of the American people. “They’re waiting for us to act,” Obama told a crowd in Ohio on Monday. “They don’t want us reading polls. They want us to look and see what is the best thing for America.” This is paternalism of the highest order — he knows what’s better for us than we do ourselves.

So, what’s a failed president to do?

How about distract the American public by throwing an ally under the bus and starting a war in the Middle East?

When President Clinton was unhappy about the burgeoning Lewinsky scandal, he wagged the dog by hurling missiles at targets in Afghanistan and Sudan. At least those were legitimate targets.

When President Obama is unhappy about his inability to convince Americans to nationalize health care, he incentivizes Palestinian Arabs to violent uprising.

Supposedly, the latest Obama administration anti-Israel campaign is a response to the Israeli government’s decision to green light 1,600 new housing units for Jews in East Jerusalem. Don’t believe it for a second. East Jerusalem is sovereign Israeli territory, and Israel has built housing for Jews there for the better part of four decades. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly stated that construction in Jerusalem would not stop. There is nothing new here that should have shocked the Obama administration.

Yet not only did this decision supposedly shock the Obama administration, it also led virtually the entire Obama cabinet to speak out against Israel. Joe Biden, who was in Israel when the decision was made by Israel, ripped Israel for undermining “trust” — whatever that means in a situation where one side’s trust entails denying the existence of the other side. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the United States was “insulted” by Israel’s decision, a vomitricious statement that arrogantly assumes that Israel’s construction policies must be geared toward pleasing the Obama administration. George Mitchell, the simpering “special envoy for Middle East peace,” cancelled a trip to Israel to show his displeasure.

Make no mistake — the timing of the latest Obama-Israel spat is purposeful on the Obama administration’s part. This response was far too well-rehearsed for it to have been triggered by something equivalent to a Housing and Urban Development dispute in the United States. You would think that Biden, the presiding officer of the Senate, would be useful during a health care debate. You would think that Obama could send Mitchell or Hillary or someone remotely qualified on Middle Eastern politics. But that’s not what Obama wanted. Obama sent Biden to Israel on March 8, even as the House and Senate looked for a way to ram through the health care bill, because he wanted Biden’s visit to trigger headlines.

And trigger headlines it did. Obama has been pressing Israel since his inauguration to concede to Palestinian Arab terrorists; he even sent his Jewish “Benedict Arnold” Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee annual conference last year to inform Jews that if they didn’t appease Palestinian Arab terrorists, the Obama administration would allow Iran to go nuclear. The Obama administration’s anti-Israel ire is nothing new.

What is new is the level of the Obama administration’s rhetoric, which has brought American-Israeli relations to the lowest point since 1956. Even as the Obama administration condemned Israel for supposedly stalling the Orwellian “peace process,” Palestinian Arabs were rioting in a Hamas-sponsored “day of rage” to protest the reopening of a Jerusalem synagogue ripped down by Arabs in 1948. The synagogue is located in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem, sovereign Israeli territory by any estimation. Yet we have not heard a peep from the Obama administration about the Arab riots over their wish to establish Judenrein in Jewish Jerusalem proper.

On Tuesday, hundreds of Arabs throughout Jerusalem burned tires and threw rocks at border guards. An Israeli policeman was shot in East Jerusalem. What do we hear from the Obama administration? Silence. This is the Obama Intifada. It is he who has suggested that the Palestinian Arabs have legitimate grievances, that Israel is the victimizer, and that the United States will stand aside and allow violent atrocities by Arabs to go forward without comment. He wants this Intifada, and he’s got it.

The Obama Intifada will serve a dual purpose: it will knock health care off the front pages, and it will provide a “crisis” for Obama to solve. If a few Jews get killed, Obama doesn’t truly care. What’s a few eggs if you’re frying up a socialized health care omelet? What’s a few Jews if you can win another Nobel Peace Prize?

Nothing, to President Obama. All that matters is his personal victory, even if America and her allies lose.

DEBKAfile, Political Analysis, Espionage, Terrorism, Security.

He gets away with insulting America

On Feb. 25, when the Iranian and Syrian presidents met in Damascus to confirm their military pact, they publicly mocked the US and its demands for Bashar Assad to distance himself from Tehran and made fun of secretary of state Hillary Clinton in person. On March, US Assistant Secretary of State Jeffrey Feltman summoned Syrian Ambassador Imad Moustapha for a quiet reprimand.
But still the Obama administration is going easy on both Iran and Syria. In fact this week it asked the Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee to confirm the appointment of Robert Ford as the first US ambassador to Damascus in five years.
Neither Clinton nor any other administration member has referred to Assad’s public insult to America and herself – in dramatic contrast to their harsh reaction to a bureaucratic step by Israel – for which prime minister Binyamin apologized – to approve the deposit of a long-term plan to build 1,600 homes in East Jerusalem. Since then, a week has gone by with Washington never tiring of berating Israel day by day.
The Syrian president has shown no contrition – nor was any demanded by the Obama administration – for joking: “We have met today to sign a separation agreement… We must have misunderstood because of a bad translation or our limited understanding, but instead signed an agreement to cancel visas.”
He was responding to Clinton’s assertion that his relationship with Iran was “deeply troubling to the region as well as to the United States.”
Assad took his time to reply to Washington’s diplomatic complaint. He finally relayed his answer not directly but through French president Nicolas Sarkozy, thereby turning a demonstrative cold shoulder to the United States government.

In his message, the Syrian president warned Washington frankly for the first time to stop expecting him to break off or degrade his ties with Tehran. In so doing, he has snatched a key Obama foreign policy goal out of the administration’s grasp. He explained that his bond with Iran was less ideological than strategic, grounded in the Arabs’ need to keep up their “resistance” to Israel. The Syrian-Iranian bond, says Assad, will peter out of its own accord when this need disappears.

Syrian contempt, intransigence and commitment to Arab violence against Israel have not discouraged the Obama administration in its courtship of this terror-sponsoring dictatorship. A senior emissary, John Kerry, Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, later affirmed his belief that “it is important to have diplomatic representation in Syria.
On March 14, The Wall Street Journal wrote succinctly:
“Mr. Obama’s foreign policy pattern to date: Our enemies get courted; our friends get the squeeze. It has happened to Poland, the Czech Republic, Honduras and Colombia. Now it’s Israel’s turn.“