Obama Rejects Palestinian Bid for Statehood Through the United Nations

Actually, I was pleasantly surprised by the president's comments on Israel. I thought he was going to come down harder on Jerusalem. His comments on the Middle East begin just before 19:00 minutues:

And here's this from the Business Week editorial:

... we were struck by the force of Obama’s description of the U.S.’s “unshakable” commitment to Israel. Rarely has a speaker at the UN rostrum spoken so clearly and obviously sympathetically on how Israeli and Jewish history shapes that nation’s security concerns. That point might seem self-evident, but it was a pointed and welcome rebuke to Holocaust deniers or minimizers in the Middle East and elsewhere.

Odder still was his silence on U.S. opposition to establishing a Palestinian state in the current UN session. Obama offered only a tepid endorsement of Palestinian aspirations to independence. Obama might feel that he made his stand against the Palestinian strategy clear by stating that negotiations and compromise offer the only path to Israeli- Palestinian peace and that “there are no shortcuts.” But we believe that most in the audience expected an explicit explanation of U.S. policy and its plan to veto a resolution of recognition in the Security Council.

Actually, I think New York's special election last week, and the role of Ed Koch, sent a huge message to the White House. The president's U.N. speech was just one of the first instances of Jewish outreach we'll be seeing a lot of over the next year.

See also New York Times, "Obama, at U.N., Explains Rationale for Opposing Palestinian Statehood Bid."

And at Business Week, "Palestinians to Delay Call for Fast UN Vote on Statehood Bid."

RELATED: Caroline Glick, "Obama's War on Israel." And from Pamela, "Obama Gaslights the Jews."