As terror fires burn all over Israel, Obama is silent

During the Sabbath there were terror fires all over Israel, the largest ones being a fire that has residents of Neve Tzuf - Halamish in Samaria still outside their homes, and the relighting of a fire in Haifa. 

I'd like to share with you a post I saw on Facebook this evening of someone who was evacuated from Beit Meir, a Moshav in the Jerusalem - Tel Aviv corridor, during the wee hours of Friday morning, together with his children and pregnant wife.

For the record, for those who still delude themselves that this is about the 'territories,' Beit Meir is within the green line that constituted Israel before 1967. 

Israel Radio reported on Friday that seven homes in Beit Meir were destroyed. But that understates the terror that the residents suffered on Thursday night. The terrorists purposely set the fires to block all the exits from the Moshav, so that the people had no place to flee until the firefighters arrived and cleared a path for them.

Here's the post. More after the post.

At around 2am this evening, terrorists set fire to my small mountain village of Beit Meir. They lit multiple blazes, surrounding the only exit from our moshav with a gulf of flames. As you can imagine, this made it exceedingly difficult for myself, my pregnant wife, and two kids to escape to safety. We, along with our neighbors, were trapped. After about an hour of harrowing confusion, firefighters managed to clear a path for the 100 families of Beit Meir to flee the inferno. I watched as dozens of righteous firefighters and police faded into the smokey distance of my rear view mirror. We fled to Beit Shemesh, and were warmly taken in at 330am by Rabbi Gerzi and his unceasingly kind family. For what's it's worth, I got out my phone to document the deluge. Perhaps it will give you a glimpse (as it did for me the first time) of the first hand horrors wrought by terrorists seeking to harm innocent civilians. It's 438am now, my kids are back asleep, and my village is no doubt still in flames. My parents are on a plane, somewhere over the Atlantic, oblivious to the chaos that awaits their arrival in Israel. Houses are still ablaze and the forest is a sea of fire. I don't know if I will have a house to return to. I just hope everyone managed to escape safely. Pray for us.
Posted by Yaakov Lehman on Thursday, November 24, 2016

Meanwhile, the self-proclaimed 'most pro-Israel administration evah' has been silent.

Now a report is finally emerging that a U.S. asset is deploying to Israel to help fight the fires.  But it’s not assistance being provided by the U.S. government.  The Israeli government has arranged with the company Global SuperTanker to send its unique Boeing 747 supertanker firefighting aircraft to Israel for support.  The plane will arrive on Friday.

Public communications about the supertanker’s deployment have been somewhat stilted – in contrast to the simple, heartfelt thanks expressed by the Israeli government to the foreign governments that have stepped up to provide assistance.

Benjamin Netanyahu put it this way, regarding the deployment from Global SuperTanker:

“It needs to be understood that the firefighting planes currently being used are not able to operate overnight. There is only one plane that has this ability, and that is the Supertanker. I instructed that it be brought here. It will take 24 hours to come from the US. We only use it in extreme situations. We don’t use it for everything but I prefer that we have too much rather than too little,” said Netanyahu.

Basically, this careful wording means Israel hired the plane.  The U.S. government isn’t providing it.  (Netanyahu would never say of aid provided by another government that “he has instructed that it be brought” to Israel.  He would publicly thank the other government, as he has done with all the foreign governments providing actual assistance.)

And not all Israelis are impressed:

However, the arrival of the supertanker has come in for criticism from some quarters. “This is a matter of politics and less of an operational need. We weren’t given the opportunity to express ourselves on the matter,” a senior member of the rescue services was quoted as saying.

To the extent it’s political, I read this as Netanyahu covering (once again) for the bad attitude of the Obama administration: arranging for an American asset to be involved in this Israeli emergency, because the longstanding ties of Israel and the United States are more important than the petulance and bad faith of an outgoing administration.

There is considerably more the administration could be doing.

By the way, nothing has changed since that post. I just googled "Obama Israel fires" and that is the most recent post.

And the Democrats are promoting the meme that Trump is an anti-Semite and a Nazi. The real anti-Semite is the current resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.