Israel Matzav

Obama and the war against Israel

David Horowitz and Jacob Laksin have a huge two-part article at NRO in which they dissect President Obama's 'war against Israel' (as they call it). The first part is here and the second part is here (I actually got a link in the second part - thanks). The argument is "If President Obama had been trying to undermine Israel’s security — and ours — he could hardly have done a better job." I really urge you to read the whole thing. Here are some highlights from Part I:

Since the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, the Arab states have conducted three unprovoked, aggressive conventional wars against it, along with a continuous terrorist war that began in 1949. Yet between 1948 and 2004 there were 322 resolutions in the U.N. General Assembly condemning the victim, Israel, and not one that condemned an Arab state.

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The Prophet Mohammed never visited Jerusalem, and consequently Jerusalem is never mentioned in the Koran. Today even Islamists regard it as only the third-holiest city in Islam, after Mecca and Medina. It was never the capital of any Arab state. Indeed, for centuries, Jerusalem was a forgotten city to most Arabs, and it was allowed to fall into ruin under Ottoman rule, which lasted until the creation of Israel and Jordan in the aftermath of the First World War. On a trip to Jerusalem in 1867, Mark Twain lamented that the city “has lost all its grandeur, and is become a pauper village.” When Jordan occupied Jerusalem between 1948 and 1967, it was treated like a backwater. Only one Arab leader, Morocco’s King Hassan, cared enough to pay a visit to the city that Muslims who are involved in the jihad against Israel now suggest is an essential part of their history.

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In April 2009, he visited Turkey, a NATO ally that was rapidly — and alarmingly — becoming an Islamist state. Addressing its parliament, he hailed Turkey as a “true partner” and suggested that it was the United States that had been the faithless friend. In a not-so-oblique attack on President Bush, Obama expressed his regret for the “difficulties of these last few years,” referring to a strain in relations caused by Turkey’s refusal to allow American troops to deploy from Turkish soil during the war in Iraq. Obama lamented that the “trust that binds us has been strained, and I know that strain is shared in many places where the Muslim faith is practiced.” In other words, Turkey’s refusal to help America support the Muslim citizens of Iraq and topple a hated tyranny was a response to America’s prejudice against Muslims.

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Even more worrisome, Obama used the occasion of his Turkish visit to break with the U.S. policy of treating countries that harbor terrorists as hostile nations. President Bush had declared that there would be no room for neutrality in the war against terror: “You are either with us or against us.” But Obama now assured his listeners in Turkey and throughout the Muslim world that their governments no longer had to choose between America and al-Qaeda. “America’s relationship with the Muslim world,” Obama said, “cannot and will not be based on opposition to al-Qaeda.”


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Immediately, five Arab nations launched a war against the Jews, who repelled the Arab attacks and established a Jewish state. When the fighting ended, the parts of the partitioned land that had been earmarked for the Arabs — namely, the West Bank and Gaza — were annexed by Jordan and Egypt, respectively, and disappeared from the map. There was no protest from the Arab world at the disappearance of “Palestine” into Jordan and Egypt, no Palestine Liberation Organization, no complaint to the U.N. The reason for the silence was that there was no Palestinian identity at the time, no movement for “self-determination,” no “Palestinian” people to make a claim. There were Arabs who lived in the region of the Jordan. But they considered themselves inhabitants of Jordan or of the Syrian province of the former Ottoman Empire. The disappearance of the West Bank and Gaza was an annexation of Arab land by Arab states.

Arab and Western revisionists have turned this history on its head to portray the Jewish war of survival as a racist, imperialist plot to expel “Palestinians” from “Palestine.” This is an utter distortion of the historical record. The term “Palestine Mandate” is a European reference to a geographical section of the defeated Turkish empire. The claim that there was a Palestinian nation from which ethnic Palestinians were expelled and which Israel now “occupies” illegally is a political lie.

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It is hardly surprising, given this historical reality, that Israel should regard with skepticism the Arab demands that Israel surrender territory — which it captured in defending itself against Arab aggression — in advance of a settlement that recognizes the existence of the Jewish state. As Netanyahu has said, “What kind of moral position is it to say that the failed aggressor should be given back all the territory from which he launched his attack?” In fact, of no other nation that has been victimized — and victimized repeatedly — by aggressors is such a concession demanded.

Yet Israeli concessions are precisely what the Obama administration is demanding as a precondition of peace. It is ostensibly doing so on the dubious assumption that if only Israel would make further concessions to the Palestinians, peace would be possible. But this assumption flies in the face of 60 years of continuous Arab aggression, including unrelenting terror attacks against Israeli civilians and explicit commitments to wipe out the Jewish state.

And here are some highlights from Part II:

Obama’s apologists insist that his message was no different from those that President Bush had previously delivered on the Persian New Year. But an actual reading of Bush’s messages reveals the absurdity of the comparison. Unlike Obama, Bush addressed his words directly to the Iranian people, not to the oppressive Iranian regime, which he condemned for pursuing nuclear weapons and depriving its citizens of the right to “live in a free society.” The word freedom appeared three times in one of Bush’s messages. It did not appear once in Obama’s. Confronting Iran’s defiance of the world community, its determination to build nuclear weapons, and its brutal suppression of its own people would have interfered with the overtures Obama was making toward a criminal regime.

After a week of bloodshed and arrests, the closest the administration would come to an official reproach was when Vice President Biden suggested that there was “some real doubt” about Iran’s official election results — in itself a generous understatement. Prior to the election, the victor had run close to his principal opponent in the polls, but when the ballots were counted, Ahmadinejad won in a landslide, claiming more votes than any politician in Iran’s history. However, so that Iran’s thugs would not mistake Biden’s remark for a policy statement, the vice president made it clear that neither the fraudulent election results nor the continuing repression would sway the Obama administration from its single-minded wooing of the regime. “We are ready to talk,” Biden said. Without conditions.

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Obama’s multiple overtures, his apologies for America’s actions in the past, and his deference to her enemies in the present have not made the world a safer place. His attempts to make Israel — America’s most loyal ally in the Middle East and the region’s only democratic state — the culprit in the dramas engulfing the region have encouraged the jihadist cause both here and abroad.

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Obama insists that the United States is not at war with Islam. But it is clear that many Muslims, including the leaders of al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Iranian government, believe that Islam is at war with the United States and Israel. The name “Hamas” stands for “Islamic Resistance Movement.” While the Obama administration maintains that Israel’s enemies are not engaged in a religious war, the Hamas charter declares in the clearest possible terms that it is engaged in one mandated by the Prophet Mohammed, whose goal is the destruction of Israel and a genocide of its Jews: “The Islamic Resistance Movement aspires to the realization of Allah’s promise, no matter how long that should take. The Prophet, Allah bless him and grant him salvation, has said: ‘The Day of Judgment will not come until Muslims fight the Jews and kill them. When the Jew hides behind the stones and the trees, the stones and trees will say, O Muslim, there is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him.’”

And further: “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it.”

And: “There is no solution for the Palestine question except through jihad.”

Because of its diminutive size, Israel is a country with little margin for error. Confronted by 300 million hostile Muslim neighbors, its security depends in no small measure on the perception that it has the inalienable support of the world’s lone superpower. It is this perception that has been gravely undermined by the Obama administration, with consequences that are already apparent. It is hardly coincidental, for example, that the United Kingdom chose the precise moment of the row over housing in Jerusalem to expel unnamed Israelis from its territory for an alleged connection to the death of a notorious Hamas arms dealer in Dubai. But it is the regional ramifications of this suddenly weakened U.S.-Israel alliance that are truly worrisome.

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On board one of the vessels, the Mavi Marmara, were active Turkish terrorists who had been allowed to board without inspection in Istanbul and had vowed on departure to become jihadist martyrs. The terrorists armed themselves with steel pipes and knives, and were prepared to attack any Israeli soldiers who boarded the vessel to enforce the blockade. A principal organizer of the operation was the Free Gaza Movement, which had attempted to break the blockade the previous June. Among its leaders were two close friends and political allies of President Obama, former Weather Underground terrorists William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, who paid a visit to the leader of Hamas after the effort failed. Also among its company were Jodie Evans, a major Obama donor, and British MP George Galloway, a supporter of Saddam Hussein and founder of the pro-Hamas group Viva Palestine.

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An attempt to run a wartime blockade would in other circumstances have resulted in a full naval assault. Israel’s restraint was rewarded by international media and governments alike describing the confrontation as a brutal attempt to block a humanitarian aid effort. Jihadists immediately seized on the event to further their campaign to delegitimize the Jewish state. This effort was led by Turkey, the very country behind the provocation and thus responsible for the deaths.

Prime Minister Erdogan denounced Israel as guilty of “state terrorism” and called the efforts of the Israelis to defend themselves a “bloody massacre.” He then claimed, “The heart of humanity has taken one of the heaviest wounds in history.” (This from a man who the previous year had defended Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir when he was indicted by the International Criminal Court for killing half a million Sudanese Christians and non-Arab Muslims.) Erdogan called for a jihad against Israel, and threatened that the Turkish navy would escort the next attempt to run the blockade. This threat was seconded by Iran, which vowed to send two “humanitarian aid” ships under escort by the Iranian navy. If carried out, this threat would be, in effect, a declaration of war.

In Hezbollah-controlled Lebanon, a leader of the terrorist organization Fatah, Munir al-Maqdah, said, “The freedom flotilla brings a message of the beginning of the end of Israel.” He announced plans for a mass march across Israel’s northern border, using civilians as human shields. “It could be that they will just break through the border, with their children and their elderly,” he explained. “What will Israel be able to do? Even if they kill all those who take part in the march, the number of remaining Palestinians will still be more than all the Jews in the world.”

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President Obama also failed to condemn Turkey’s role in the incident, and insisted instead that Israel allow an international body to investigate its actions. Obama then met with Mahmoud Abbas, to promise $400 million in economic aid to the West Bank and Gaza — in other words, to shore up the terrorist state and its ruling terrorist party. At the same time, senior officials of the Obama administration began telling representatives of foreign governments that the United States would support a U.N. resolution calling for a commission to investigate Israel’s (but not Turkey’s or Hamas’s) role in the incident.

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During the year and a half Obama has been in office, he has indeed brought change to America and to the world. He has transformed a nation that had been the world’s bulwark of democracy and freedom into an enabler of the very forces that are intent on destroying them. He has helped to isolate America’s only ally in the Middle East, its sole democracy and most vulnerable people. And he has brought the impending war of annihilation against the “crusaders” and the Jews, which the jihadists have promised, measurably closer to its nightmare fruition.

Read the whole thing. The first part is here and the second part is here.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 6:33 PM