Israel Matzav

While her husband fumed, Jill Biden visited Muslims, Bedouins and dead Jews

While her husband fumed at the Israeli government during their trip here last week, Jill Biden spent her time visiting Muslims and Bedouins and dead Jews in a trip that was largely orchestrated by the recently disgraced New Israel Fund.

While Vice President Joe Biden was denouncing Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu for the government’s announcement of progress in a building plan for Jews in part of Jerusalem, his wife visited Muslim children and a Bedouin group funded by the New Israel Fund (NIF). The organization, which also funds organizations that are rabidly anti-Zionist, has recently come under fire for using foreign money whose sources are not revealed. Sixteen of the organizations that it funds gave over 90% of the anti-Israel reports to the Goldstone commission that investigated Operation Cast Lead in Gaza last year.

The Bidens landed in Israel Monday evening, and Jill Biden began her official tour Tuesday morning with a visit to teachers and children at the integrated Peace Pre-School program at the Jerusalem International YMCA.

Her only visits to exclusively-Jewish areas were to graves and the like: the gravesites of Theodore Herzl and former Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin at Mt. Herzl, and the Masada fortress overlooking the Dead Sea.

You can complain about the New Israel Fund (justifiably) all you want, but Dr. Biden isn't exactly a native here, and the Israeli government should have taken the bull by its horns and shown her around.

This reminds me of the days when I was interviewing at out-of-town law firms during law school. The firms that also brought Mrs. Carl along would send a partner's wife to our hotel to take Mrs. Carl out on the town for the day. That was a lovely idea but for one problem: They had my resume but not Mrs. Carl's, so the day was always planned around my interests, which were not necessarily hers. But she got really good at grinning and bearing it. And the law firms did a much better job of it than the Israeli government did.

By the way, I see nothing wrong with taking her to Massada, although something tells me they did not have her climb the snake path.

Read the whole thing.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 5:40 AM