Glick on Obama's pipe dream
On Monday, we all learned about President Obama's pipe dream. Caroline Glick talks about its implications for Israel. The basic reality that the US is being led by a radical ideologue who clings to his views in the face of overwhelming proof of their falsity is the most fundamental fact that world leaders must reckon with today as they formulate policies to contend with the Obama administration. This is first and foremost the case for Israel.I'm not sure that Obama's advisers even believe that the US is 'best served' by fighting with its allies. One of Obama's goals appears to be to degrade the US's position in the world and to make it more like other nations by showing that the US can be just as unreliable an ally as everybody else. In addition to Georgia and Ukraine (whom Glick suggests Obama is abandoning during his current trip to Russia), see Israel, Britain, Honduras, South Korea and Japan.
Since the Netanyahu government took office three months ago, the Obama administration has placed inordinate pressure on Jerusalem in a bid to coerce it into making massive concessions to the Palestinians. These concessions are demanded not for peace, but simply for the sake of placing pressure on Israel. Obama wishes to pressure it to show his good intentions to the Arabs and Iran.
TO DATE, Obama's loudest demand has been to officially prohibit all Jewish construction in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria. Although the demand is intrinsically bigoted, illegal and immoral, and although the consequences of the expulsion of all Jews from Gaza in 2005 shows that Israeli land giveaways and ethnic cleansing bring war not peace, the Netanyahu government has opted not to get into an open confrontation with the administration on the issue.
Instead, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and his government have sought to treat Obama's offensive as a routine disagreement between otherwise close allies. Rather than defending the principles of Jewish national, legal and human rights and the country's right to security, Netanyahu has sought to reach an accommodation with Obama by reducing the discussion to a conversation about the inevitable natural growth of Jewish communities due to expanding families.
But what Obama's slavish devotion to his radical world view shows is that Netanyahu's decision to seek an accommodation is not simply an exercise in futility, it is a recipe for disaster. Obama and his advisers do not care that Jewish fertility rates are the fastest rising in the world. They do not care that by arguing for a complete halt in "natural" growth, they are effectively adopting a eugenics argument the likes of which no US policy-maker has dared to advance since before the Holocaust. They are looking to fight because they believe that the US is best served by fighting with its allies - particularly with Israel. Any concession Netanyahu makes will just form the basis for the next round of demands.
Interestingly, Glick goes on to argue that Israel should consider cutting back or ending its military assistance from the United States.
Read the whole thing.
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 8:10 AM
3 Comments:
"The basic reality that the US is being led by a radical ideologue who clings to his views in the face of overwhelming proof of their falsity is the most fundamental fact that world leaders must reckon with today as they formulate policies to contend with the Obama administration."
Yep, seems likely and it's difficult to imagine any other hypothesis that seems more likely.
Caroline Glick's assessment is right. Obama makes Jimmy Carter look like a moderate. He's turned out to be worse than any one thought possible and the next three years promise no relief.
What could go wrong indeed
In my opinion, Obama's strategy for 'change' for the U.S. goes beyond simply the ideology of the left. Radicals, with whom Obama associated himself for most of his life, believe strongly in punishment and restitution for wrongs of the past and that only they are capable of descerning those wrongs. Obama believes that capitalism and by extension, western style, or more specifically, U.S. style democracy is directly responsible for the suffering and exploitation of discrete peoples around the world - peoples with whom Obama sees himself strongly connected. For these reasons, as Obama sees them, the U.S. currently unique in the world and Israel, unique in the Middle East, must be made to do pennance.
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