If Obama had delivered the speech he just gave in Jerusalem to the annual AIPAC convention, he might have been booed. No, check that, he definitely would have been booed. Not by everyone, of course, but by quite a few people. (I’ve been to enough of them to know.)
He would not have been booed for his vigorous endorsement of the Zionist idea, of course; nor for his promise to stand by Israel though thick and thin; not for his expressions of admiration for Jews and Judaism; and not for the promise to maintain Israel’s qualitative military edge; but for asking his audience to sympathize with ordinary Palestinians, who have lousy lives in good measure because of the occupation. He definitely would have been heckled for that one. And I’m sure of one other thing: His endorsement of a Palestinian state, as an answer to the existential dilemma of the Palestinians, and as an answer to the question of whether Israel can maintain itself as a Jewish-majority democracy, would have been met at AIPAC by a combination of tepid applause, silence, and scattered heckling. It’s obvious to me that from now on, Obama should deliver his pro-Israel speeches at the Jerusalem Convention Center, not the Washington Convention Center.
The speech was, overall, quite eloquent and strong, and very moving from the Jewish perspective (there were bits that were too naive for me, but more on that later). It is the setting, though, that made it brilliant: Standing ovations from young Israelis for an endorsement of a Palestinian state by an enthusiastically Zionist African-American President whose middle name is Hussein. How, exactly, did he pull that one off?
WarSclerotic 
March 22, 2013 at 8:20 AM
Obama unveils credible threat against Iran: Israel
http://www.madisdead.blogspot.co.il/2013/03/obama-unveils-credible-threat-against.html
It is a bit strange that the most powerful nation on Earth with a population of 330 million is delegating the leadership of the free word to a country of 7.7 million. But this is definitely progress. If the reports about the newly revealed Iranian site, 14 miles long and miles 7 .5 wide are true, events seems be coming to a head.
The mutually assured destruction doctrine (MAD) does not work with Iran and according to some apocalyptic hadiths the Twelvers would start a nuclear war in order to kill 2/3 of humanity and trigger the return of the Mahdi who is in “occultation”.
“Iran is led by a group of irrational men who believe they can hurry the arrival of the Mahdi – the 12th Imam who, according to Shi’ite Islamic tradition, went missing in 874 CE and will return under conditions of global chaos. The Iranian leadership appears willing to sacrifice the population of its own country to achieve this goal.
In his book The Rise of Nuclear Iran, former Israeli ambassador to the UN Dore Gold writes, “Mahdi Khaliji, an Iranian Shi’ite scholar… has noted that there are apocalyptic hadiths [received Shi’ite traditions] that the Mahdi will not return unless one-third of the world population is killed and another third die. But Ahmadinejad and his followers believe man can actively create the conditions for the Mahdi’s arrival in the here and now…”
This means that the US and everyone else on this planet is in the same boat and if the US expects Israel to be the one to act first then it is delegating its defense to Israel.