Netanyahu sounded like a man who was trying to convince himself of something. Perhaps he thought he might convince Obama of Israel’s historic loyalty and importance as America’s most important strategic ally in the Middle East. After Obama’s performance at that press conference, it was understandable that the Israeli prime minister would feel the need to do that. It became clear at the meeting, which Obama had initially postponed, that Israel was being relegated to second-class status as far as its relationship with the United States was concerned.
In his remarks Obama was far less effusive than was Netanyahu. Obama did not call Netanyahu a “friend of the United States,” or confirm Netanyahu’s effusions about his alleged pro-Israel sentiments. He praised the Israeli leader’s “political skills” and said that he was confident the prime minister would “rise to the occasion” as he would be “confronted with as many important decisions about the long-term strategic interests of Israel as any prime minister that we’ve seen in a very long time.” He declared, as if his solicitude for the Palestinians was quite understandable but that his concern for the Israelis was unusual, that it was “in the interests not only of the Palestinians but also the Israelis and the United States and the international community to achieve a two-state solution in which Israelis and Palestinians are living side by side in peace and security.”
Obama then noted, correctly, that “we have seen progress stalled on this front.” But just as he has consistently acted since he has been president as if the conflict between the United States and the Islamic world is entirely the fault of the United States and within America’s power to end, so he seemed to assume that it was entirely up to Netanyahu and Israel to get progress moving toward this vaunted two-state solution: “And I suggested to the prime minister that he has a historic opportunity to get a serious movement on this issue during his tenure.”
To be sure, Obama did say that “there is no reason why we should not seize this opportunity and this moment for all the parties concerned to take seriously those obligations and to move forward in a way that assures Israel’s security, that stops the terrorist attacks that have been such a source of pain and hardship, and that we can stop rocket attacks on Israel, but that also allows Palestinians to govern themselves as an independent state that allows economic development to take place, that allows them to make serious progress in meeting the aspirations of their people.”30
However, while calling upon Netanyahu to rise to the occasion, Obama issued no similar call to Palestinian Arab leaders. Yet the weekend before Obama met with Netanyahu, Hamas, in control of the Gaza Strip and a significant presence in the West Bank, had repeated that it would never recognize Israel’s right to exist—in other words, it was still dedicated to Israel’s total destruction.31 Hamas chief Khaled Meshaal said also, nine days before Obama met with Netanyahu, that Hamas would never accept a two-state solution, either.32
And what if it did, anyway? The PLO’s ambassador to Lebanon, Abbas Zaki, said in April 2009 that “with the two-state solution, in my opinion, Israel will collapse, because if they get out of Jerusalem, what will become of all the talk about the Promised Land and the Chosen People? What will become of all the sacrifices they made—just to be told to leave? They consider Jerusalem to have a spiritual status. The Jews consider Judea and Samaria to be their historic dream. If the Jews leave those places, the Zionist idea will begin to collapse. It will regress of its own accord. Then we will move forward.”33
Was this the kind of attitude that Obama wanted to encourage? Certainly if he didn’t, he did nothing to discourage it.
And his take on Iran’s threat to Israel was no better. Obama declared during his meeting with Netanyahu that “it is in U.S. national security interests to assure that Israel’s security as an independent Jewish state is maintained.” But in speaking of Iran’s nuclear threat, he said that he wanted Iran to be “in a position to provide opportunities and prosperity for their people, but that the way to achieve those goals is not through the pursuit of a nuclear weapon”—as if Iran was pursuing nukes to alleviate some economic distress than can be relieved in some other way.
Fanatical Shi’ite messianism and genocidal hatred for Israel? Nothing that a few good talks couldn’t cure!
Obama also said: “It’s not clear to me why my outstretched hand would be interpreted as weakness.” But it wasn’t just reporters who saw it as weakness, it was the Iranian mullahs, who stepped up their demands and ratcheted up the bellicosity of their rhetoric considerably once Obama took office. Still, Israel’s “great friend,” and the nominal standard-bearer of the free world against the global jihad, did not adjust his course.
The jihad against Israel stayed on course also. Obama said during his press conference with Netanyahu that he supported “a two-state solution in which Israelis and Palestinians are living side by side in peace and security.” Hamas, unimpressed—or even emboldened—by Obama’s concessions and overtures, responded by sending rockets into Israel again on the next day, severely damaging a home in Sderot and wounding several people. As the rockets fell, Senator and 2004 Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry (D-MA) was meeting with Netanyahu to discuss the finer points of Obama’s plan for peace between Israel and the Palestinians.34
Ten days after Obama met with Netanyahu, he welcomed Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas to the White House. The contrast with the chilly atmosphere of the Netanyahu meeting couldn’t have been more stark. Obama met Abbas bearing a gift: a firm U.S. demand that Israel stop the settlements in what it called Palestinian territories.35 He had met Netanyahu with no corresponding gift: no call to the Palestinians to stop the rocket attacks into Israel, or to tone down the genocidal and hate-filled anti-Semitic rhetoric that filled their airwaves even on children’s programs, or to recognize Israel in a definitive and honest way.
MILITARY TRAINING FOR THE PALESTINIANS
In May 2009 came the revelation that the United States and allied military, under the command of Lt. Gen. Keith Dayton, was training 1,500 Palestinian troops. “We also have something in our pocket,” Dayton explained, “called the West Bank Training Initiative where we have plans to continue a series of courses in the West Bank on logistics, leadership, first aid, maintenance, English language, battalion staff training and driver education. These are led by our British and Turkish officers with an eye to eventually turning this over to the Palestinians themselves.”36
Would American-trained Palestinian troops one day go into battle against the forces of American ally Israel? It was a distinct possibility.
But, of course, that was not why Lieutenant General Dayton and his aides were training the Palestinians. American officials were evidently hoping that the Palestinians trained in logistics, leadership, and battalion staff training would use this knowledge to fight against Hamas. That was fanciful enough. It reflected the widespread fantasy in Washington that Fatah represented a “moderate” alternative to Hamas and, once it prevailed in the Palestinian Authority, would establish a Palestinian state that would recognize Israel’s right to exist and live in peace side by side with the Jewish state. No one could have held this fantasy without ignoring numerous indications to the contrary, such as this July 2009 statement by Rafik Natsheh of the Fatah Central Committee:
Fatah does not recognize Israel’s right to exist nor have we ever asked others to do so. All these reports about recognizing Israel are false. It’s all media nonsense. We don’t ask other factions to recognize Israel because we in Fatah have never recognized Israel.37
Even aside from its Fatah fantasy, however, there were indications that the U.S. government under Barack Hussein Obama no longer had much of a problem with Hamas participating in the government of the new Palestinian state Obama so longed to establish. He had talked tough during his campaign about isolating Hamas and compelling it to renounce terrorism, but once he took the Oath of Office, he seemed to forget everything he had ever said about the terrorist group.
THE RENEGI
NG BEGINS
Even before his meeting with Netanyahu, and even before the fateful week in May 2009 that Glick saw as marking the Obama administration’s “harshest onslaught against Israel to date,”38 Obama’s pro-Israel pose was a distant memory. He was working hard to renege on his 2008 AIPAC promise to “isolate Hamas unless and until they renounce terrorism, recognize Israel’s right to exist, and abide by past agreements.”39
He said at that time that “there is no room at the negotiating table for terrorist organizations,” but as president, in April 2009, he was singing a different tune. He asked Congress to revise American laws preventing financial aid to terrorist organizations so that the United States could keep funding the Palestinian Authority even with Hamas as part of the government.40
Rep. Mark Steven Kirk (R-IL) had an eye for the outrage of legitimizing a group that celebrated the murders of Israeli civilians in pizza parlors and on buses. He remarked drily to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that this was tantamount to supporting a government that “only has a few Nazis in it.”41
The Obama administration did not ask the Palestinians to meet any conditions whatsoever, despite the conditions Obama had promised he would insist upon while he was campaigning for president. In October 2009, national security adviser Gen. James Jones declared that nothing was going to stand in the way of the creation of a Palestinian state. Speaking of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at the Fourth Annual Gala of the American Task Force on Palestine (ATFP), Jones said, “The time has come to relaunch negotiations without preconditions to reach a final status agreement on two states.”42
Jones emphasized the president’s personal commitment to this resolution: “President Obama’s dedication to achieve these goals is unshaken, is committed, and we will be relentless in our pursuit of achieving these.” Belying Obama’s AIPAC promises, Jones said nothing about isolating Hamas until they renounce terrorism. Not a word about the need for Hamas or any other Palestinian entity to recognize Israel’s right to exist. Nothing about compelling the Palestinians to abide by past agreements, which they have routinely violated. And Jones was entirely mum about the necessity for the Palestinians to renounce “the false prophets of extremism,” of which they are obviously still quite enamored.
History is full of ironies. And the Palestinians had more in store.
Just as Hamas fired rockets into Israel the day after Obama spoke confidently, at his press conference with Netanyahu, about Israel living peacefully side by side with a Palestinian state, so also the day after General Jones assured the ATFP crowd that the state would be established, Hamas made sure that no one got the impression that the Palestinians really had any intention at all of living in peace with the Israelis. Hamas’s Al-Aqsa TV broadcast a children’s program, “Tomorrow’s Pioneers,” that featured a Palestinian child expressing a desire to become an English teacher in order “to teach children the language of their enemy.” Then a recurring character on the program, Nassur the bear, chimed in: “Like me! Just like I know the Zionist enemy’s language.”43
That Palestinian children were being taught that the United States and Israel are the “enemy” is no surprise. Still, coming at the same time as Jones’s remarks, it provided yet another indication of just how disconnected from reality was the Obama administration’s policy. General Jones, according to an ATFP press release, “said that ending the conflict and the occupation is essential because what is at stake is ‘nothing less than the dignity and the security of all human beings.’”
But Obama and Jones never quite seemed to grasp the fact that only one side was teaching its children that the other was the “enemy.” And that sentiment was in any case hardly compatible with the new era of peace that was supposed to dawn with the establishment of this state. Would the Palestinians cease to regard Israel and the United States as their “enemies” once this state was established? Would they begin to teach their children peace and tolerance? Would they renounce the jihad doctrine that settles for nothing less than the entire destruction of Israel, as their leaders have repeated on numerous occasions?
The real answer to all those questions and others like them is “no.” But even worse, Obama and Jones weren’t asking them. They were determined to establish a Palestinian state despite the abundant evidence that the Palestinians have not renounced their jihadist intransigence, and would use a new Palestinian state as a terror base from which to launch new attacks against the “Zionist entity”—just as Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza did not usher in the promised new era of peace, but only more jihad.
Obama and Jones should have known better. And they probably did. For they knew Hamas. Apparently, they liked Hamas. For as he made concessions to Hamas in Gaza, Obama pursued the same policy stateside, making numerous overtures to dubious Hamas-linked entities.
As we have seen, the promise of Israel’s destruction is in the first paragraph of the Hamas charter. This is no secret. And Hamas refuses to alter it or change its mission.
“Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it.”
But Obama didn’t just sidle up to Jew-haters abroad. He sought to legitimize them here as well. For one thing, he wasn’t through cozying up to the Islamic Society of North America.
THE JEW-HATING ISNA CONVENTION
His eye—as always—on outreach to Muslims, Barack Obama on July 3, 2009, sent Valerie Jarrett, his senior advisor and assistant to President Obama for public engagement and intergovernmental affairs, to speak at the 46th Annual Convention of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA).
Jarrett ended up addressing a racist hate-fest. At the ISNA conference, pure hate speech and Islamic anti-Semitism were promoted—and the Obama administration was there.
Imam Warith-Deen Umar spoke about his books, Jews for Salaam: The Straight Path to Global Peace and Judaiology. Umar, the former head of New York prisons’ Muslim chaplain program, repeatedly described Jewish conspiracies to control the world: “Why do this small number of people,” he asked, “have control of the world?… There’s some people in the world says no Holocaust even happened. Some of their leaders say no Holocaust even happened. Well it did happen. These people were punished. They were punished for a reason, because they were serially disobedient to Allah.”44 He means that the Jews, who are portrayed as “serially disobedient to Allah” in the Qur’an, deserved all they got in the Holocaust.
Valerie Jarrett was there. She was apparently right at home, uttering nary a word of protest.
HAMAS TV IN WASHINGTON
That’s not all. In July 2009, Obama invited the propaganda television station of Hamas, Al-Quds TV, to film propaganda in the United States—on the American taxpayer’s dime.
The proposal came from the U.S. Consulate in Jerusalem: Al-Quds TV, the mouthpiece for Hamas, would film “several documentaries on the life of Muslims in America.
The nominated 2–3 person TV crew will conduct interviews with local Muslim leaders and individuals, visit Muslim institutions and organizations, and meet with USG officials.” All at U.S. taxpayers’ expense.45
The stated goal of this venture was to “improve attitudes of Palestinian public and leaders toward U.S. policies, principles, and people.” It would try to accomplish this by showing Muslims in America as “active participants in civil society” and highlighting their “contributions to U.S. society overall.” The documentaries would show that Muslims in the United States enjoyed “equal and full exercise of guaranteed civil rights and full protection under the law to practice their religion freely,” and would “help counter numerous local press reports of alleged discrimination against Muslims living in the United States.”46
Why did the State Department think it necessary to appeal to the Palestinians in this way? Why wasn’t it calling upon them to improve their own human-rights situation, and to end the endless vilification of Israel on the same TV stations that were slated to run these documentaries?
&
nbsp; Why was it trying to improve the image of the United States, as if we were the guilty party, instead of challenging the oppressive and bloody rule of Hamas in Gaza?
In fact, this attempt to “improve the image of the United States” became official policy of the U.S. government. The State Department commissioned a confidential survey of Palestinians in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip. The Department of State’s Office of Opinion Research, the official pollster for the U.S. government outside the United States, is designed to gauge foreign public opinion so as to help diplomats in their missions. This office commissioned a “reputable local research firm” that conducted “face-to-face interviews” with “a representative sample of 2,000 adult Palestinians, age 18” to ascertain what could be done to “improve the image of the U.S.” in the minds of jihadist barbarians who celebrate the murders of people going about their business in buses and restaurants.
The results of the poll were hardly surprising. The respondents demanded more money (in line with the Qur’an’s demand that non-Muslims pay tribute to Islamic rulers), more respect for Islam, and more pressure on Israel.
Was a survey like this one taken in Israel?47
HONORING AN ANTI-SEMITE
In August 2009, the Obama administration announced that Mary Robinson would be given the Presidential Medal of Freedom—the highest honor given to civilians in the United States.
Superficially, it seemed like a reasonable choice. Mary Robinson had been president of Ireland and United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. But—unsurprisingly, given Obama’s other appointments and associations—she has also been consistent in her virulent opposition to Israel. Gil Troy, a professor of history at McGill University in Toronto, notes that “she was one of the people most responsible for the great debacle at Durban, 2001, when a conference convened to fight racism became a UN-sponsored hate-fest against Jews.” Troy points out that “in her closing remarks Robinson declared ‘we… succeeded,’ a shocking statement considering that anti-Zionists hijacked the conference, demonizing Israel, bullying Jewish participants and distributing crude anti-Semitic images of hooked-nose Jews at the parallel NGO [Non-Governmental Organizations] forum.”48
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