Christopher Hitchens on how Obama is handling Iran
Christopher Hitchens has correctly summed up the inadequacy of President Obama's handling of Iran: There is then the larger question of the Iranian theocracy and its continual, arrogant intervention in our affairs: its export of violence and cruelty and lies to Lebanon and Palestine and Iraq and its unashamed defiance of the United Nations, the European Union, and the International Atomic Energy Agency on the nontrivial matter of nuclear weapons. I am sure that I was as impressed as anybody by our president's decision to quote Martin Luther King—rather late in the week—on the arc of justice and the way in which it eventually bends. It was just that in a time of crisis and urgency he was citing the wrong King text (the right one is to be found in the "Letter From a Birmingham Jail"), and it was also as if he were speaking as the president of Iceland or Uruguay rather than as president of these United States. Coexistence with a nuclearized, fascistic theocracy in Iran is impossible even in the short run. The mullahs understand this with perfect clarity. Why can't we?Answer: Because it interferes in 'our' vision of a world where a 'Palestinian'
By the way, when I wrote the post that's linked in the previous paragraph, I was afraid that I was exaggerating the importance of the 'Palestinians' to Obama's foreign policy. I discovered today that no less a scholar than Martin Kramer agrees with me.
There is nothing at all surprising about Barack Obama's reluctance to embrace the surge for freedom in Iran. As I've shown, he received his primer on the Middle East from Rashid Khalidi, who facilitated Obama's formation as a Palestine-centric Third Worldist. In this view of things, only the situation of the Palestinians deserves to be described as "intolerable" —the word Obama used in Cairo—and action is promised only to them. Iranians are defrauded and assaulted by the bizarre dictatorship of the "Supreme Leader" and his Basiji minions? America, Obama says, is "watching." Why? Obama's master plan for the Middle East is supposed to commence with his entry to Jerusalem as the messiah of peace, godfather of the Palestinian state. Everything is supposed to follow from that.As we Jews say in a vastly different context (the study of Torah) Baruch She'kivanti (thank God I said something that finds support among the greater scholars).
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 4:29 PM
4 Comments:
You forgot to link the Hitchens op-ed.
Of course, America never meddles in the affairs of anyone else. Neither does Israel, for that matter.
carl,
you do know that hitchens not only supports a palestinian state, but sees israel as an agressor....right?
you also know that he was dead wrong on iraq and he is dead wrong on how obama is handling the situation with iran
you also know that hitchens thinks that you, as a religious jew, are nothing short of a bufoon.
I think the point is well taken and only reinforces the perception most people have about Obama's foreign policy being based on ideology rather than reality. Only that orientation could explain why the Administration is pursuing an engagement with an oppressive regime Iran when the justifications for pursuing such an engagement have disappeared. If anything, Obama is handing Iran with kid gloves.
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