Wednesday, December 28, 2016

Obama's historical ignorance


Jeb Babbin writes at the American Spectator,
President Obama’s enmity toward Israel, though often denied, has been obvious since his inauguration. Through many meetings with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his attempt to force a false peace between Israel and the Palestinians, and his nuclear weapons deal with Iran, Obama has made it clear to anyone who wanted to see that his hatred of Israel coincided with his intention to diminish our national security as well as that of the Jewish state.

Obama is not just pro-Palestinian, he is anti-Israel. Set aside the issue of whether he and Kerry are anti-Semitic. They probably are. More importantly, to the narcissistic Obama, opposition to Israel and Netanyahu is a very personal fight.

Obama has always seen his presidency as a vehicle for the accommodation of Islamic nations. This is the president who ordered his director of NASA to make his primary mission an outreach to the Islamic world, rather than other planets. In his June 2009 speech in Cairo, Obama told the Islamic world that part of the job of America’s president is to fight against negative stereotypes of Muslims. There was no mention of the need to fight against Islamic nations’ aggression against our allies.

Obama’s approach was historically ignorant. Three times since 2000, Israeli prime ministers have offered land for peace and been rebuffed. Ehud Barak offered up East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, and the West Bank in a plan designed by Bill Clinton, but Yassir Arafat, then Palestinian “president,” walked out of the talks. In 2005, Ariel Sharon withdrew all Israelis from the Gaza Strip and pulled Israel back across the pre-1967 borders. The Palestinians answered by raining missiles on Israel from Gaza. In 2008, Ehud Olmert offered essentially 100 percent of the West Bank, all of Gaza, and a divided Jerusalem to be the capital of both the still non-existent nation of Palestine and Israel. Mahmoud Abbas took the offer to study it and left never returned to the negotiations.

...In March 2015, Netanyahu did something Obama never forgave. He addressed a joint session of Congress, at then-Speaker John Boehner’s invitation, forcefully warning against the Iran nuclear deal. Obama made that deal later in the year. As President-elect Trump has said many times, it was an awful deal. And, as this column has detailed many times, it is a deal that drastically diminishes America’s national security.

Instead of properly submitting the Iran deal to the Senate for ratification (as every preceding nuclear deal had been), Obama took it to the UN, obtaining a Security Council resolution blessing it. But it remains unratified, so Trump can void it any time he wishes.

...Some in Congress have advocated diminishing our funding of the UN which accounts for at least 22 percent of its annual revenue. Trump should demand that Congress drastically reduce our payments to the UN. We await his decision to press Congress to do so. We’ll see if he does. Part of history’s judgment of his presidency will be rendered on it.

It’s time to walk Reagan’s path again and not let the anti-American, anti-Israel United Nations decide our policies.

Was this Obama’s last betrayal of our national security interests? There are still 25 days left. What more damage will he do?
Read more here.

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