Well, check out Jonathan Tobin's response on this, "Editorials Skewer the Truth About Obama’s Pressure on Israel":
Yesterday the Washington Post stated the obvious when it noted that under President Obama, America’s relations with the state of Israel had deteriorated. In contrast to the administration’s desperate efforts to curry favor with Venezuela, Russia, and Iran, the focus of American foreign policy in the past seven months has been to heighten tensions with the Middle East’s sole democracy.There's more at the link.
A day later, as if on cue, the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times responded with their own editorials in support of Obama’s blundering.
The L.A. Times’s stance, titled “Obama’s evenhanded Mideast policy,” is a straightforward defense of an abrupt change toward Israel while disingenuously claiming that Obama’s friendship with it ought not to be questioned. The editorial endorses the downgrading of the U.S.-Israel alliance from one of close cooperation and support to a more equivocal relationship, in which Israel would be subjected to pressure to conform to specific ideas about achieving peace. Considering “evenhanded” a good approach means ignoring the isolation that would ensue if the United States abandons Israel: the Jewish state would be effectively left without an ally in the region and surrounded by a hostile Islamic culture that still rejects its legitimacy even in those few states that have officially come to terms with it.
But the claim of evenhandedness is itself a falsehood since it is very clear that Obama’s public pressure on Israel far outweighs Washington’s gentle urgings that the Palestinians should cease their support for the infrastructure of terror and to halt the official incitement of hatred toward Jews and Israel that is the hallmark of Palestinian political culture. Nor has the administration’s call for Saudi Arabia and other Arab nations to tone down their hostility toward Israel been either energetic or successful.
The L.A. Times goes as far as to say that Obama is right to scrap George W. Bush’s commitments to Israel, which recognized that a complete withdrawal to the 1949 armistice lines would be unrealistic in any peace agreement. Israel paid for this promise in hard currency through a complete withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 and was rewarded for this concession with the creation of a sovereign terrorist Hamasistan that remains free to bombard southern Israel with rockets. If Obama repudiates this promise, why should Israelis trust him when he makes his own guarantees about their country’s safety once a Palestinian state is put in place?
But even more to the point, the notion that as a prerequisite for peace, the U.S.’s demand for an absolute freeze to all building over the green line in both the West Bank and Jerusalem is as absurd as it is unfair. Israel has proved time and again that it will uproot settlements in exchange for peace or even for the false hope of quiet, as was the case with Gaza. The demand for a freeze does not advance negotiations; it is a substitute for talks, since squeezing Israel in this manner predetermines the outcome in favor of the Palestinians. That is not a negotiation but rather a dictate.
See also, The Astute Bloggers, Israpundit, Power Line, and Yid With Lid.
Hat Tip: Memeorandum.
2 comments:
Israeli nuclear-armed submarines are even now awaiting instructions to strike, although informed comment has the year-end.
The Dolphin class submarines will be sent through the Suez canal, skirting Yemen and Oman , up into the Straits of Hormuz in the Gulf, offshore from the UAE, there to fire warheads directly into Iran. These would have air-support from US supplied, missile loaded, Israeli F16 multi-strike aircraft.
'The first subs of this class, equipped with sophisticated navigation and combat systems, were supplied to Israel by Germany in the 1990s, two of them as a gift. At Israel ’s request, besides the six 533 mm launching tubes, suitable for short-range cruising missiles, all the subs were outfitted with four additional 659 mm tubes for launching long-range nuclear cruising missiles: the Popeye Turbos, which can strike targets up to 1500 km away. These missiles are a spin-off from the US versions and were manufactured jointly by the Israeli firm Rafael and Lockheed-Martin in an airborne version.
In 2010 the three nuclear attack-submarines will be joined by two others, again from Germany . They were built in the Howaldtswerke-Deutsche Werft AG shipyards at a cost of 1.27 billion dollars, one third of which was financed by the German government. The Jerusalem Post confirms that also the two new ones, whose type-code is U-212, were built according to “Israeli specifications”: they are faster (20 knots), have a wider range of action (4,500 km), and are more silent, allowing them to close in on objectives without being spotted.
According to military experts, one of the three Dolphins furnished by Germany patrols the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, the second is deployed in the Mediterranean , while the third is held in reserve. With the addition of two more, the number of those under sail, ready to launch a nuclear attack, has as much as doubled. And this is only part of Israel ’s nuclear might, estimated as between 200-400 warheads, equivalent to almost four thousand Hiroshima-type bombs, and whose vectors include over three-hundred US F-16 and F-15 fighter planes and about fifty Jericho II ballistic missiles on mobile launching ramps. These and other nuclear weapons are ready for launching around the clock.’
Estimated worldwide nuclear stockpiles, 2009
Country: Total Warheads: Population
Russia:13,000 / 142,000,000
United States:9,400 / 307,000,000
*Israel (undeclared):100 - 400 max / 7,400,000
Dependent on the true number of undeclared nuclear warheads, Israel could be the 3rd most powerful nuclear state in the world if possessing the maximum estimated number of WMD. In that event she would be twice as powerful as the UK with a demographic just over only 1/10th the size of Britain’s.
Undeclared nuclear states (from Wikipedia)
Nuclear weapons and Israel
Israel is not a member of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and refuses to officially confirm or deny having a nuclear arsenal, or having developed nuclear weapons, or even having a nuclear weapons program. Israel has pledged not to be the first country to introduce nuclear weapons into the region, but is also pursuing a policy of strategic ambiguity with regard to their possession. In the late 1960s, Israeli Ambassador to the US Yitzhak Rabin informed the United States State Department, that its understanding of "introducing" such weapons meant that they would be tested and publicly declared, while merely possessing the weapons did not constitute "introducing" them. Although Israel claims that the Negev Nuclear Research Center near Dimona is a "research reactor", or, as was originally claimed, a "textile factory," no scientific reports based on work done there have ever been published. Extensive information about the program in Dimona was also disclosed by technician Mordechai Vanunu in 1986.
According to the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Federation of American Scientists, Israel possesses around 75–200 weapons.
GD
It has, to me at least, become not a little comical that so many supposedly "learned" among us, who have walls plastered with advanced degrees from Harvard, Yale, and God knows where else, cannot bring themselves to understand that God's chosen people, the Jews, regained their homeland for the third and FINAL time in 1948.
They will not lose it again.
Ever.
The UN-pleasing machinations of Barack Hussein Obama, along with his fellow anti-Semitic Islamic friends, have no bearing on that reality whatsoever.
True Christians already know this.
Sadly, most of the world is going to have to discover it the hard way.
-Dave
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