Crimes Against Liberty (52 page)

This was no one-off event;
NewsBusters
provided links to other anti-Jewish posts on the website.
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While some may be reluctant to hold Obama responsible for what others posted on his website, one wonders how these apparent anti-Semites got posting privileges, assuming Obama’s own people didn’t write these missives themselves. The MSM, unsurprisingly, declined to investigate the question; Obama always gets a presumptive pass, whether for Jeremiah Wright, William Ayers, or anti-Semitic contributors to his website.

“CAN ISRAEL STILL CALL THE UNITED STATES ITS BEST INTERNATIONAL FRIEND?”

After winning the presidential election, Obama made moves even before he assumed office that cast doubt on his campaign pose as a friend of Israel. In December 2008 he appointed as his national security adviser James Jones, a man, according to reports, who is “not known as a friend of the Jewish State.” In his new position, Jones lived up to his reputation, assembling Brent Scowcroft and Carter-era anti-Israel stalwart Zbigniew Brzezinski to meet with Obama and urge him to impose a solution on Israel. Furthermore, in a keynote speech at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Jones kicked off his remarks with a joke invoking stereotypes about greedy Jewish merchants. As
Red State
’s Jeff Dunetz pointed out, the White House tried to whitewash the joke by omitting it from the transcript it sent to reporters.
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From its inception, the Obama administration treated Israel not as a sovereign nation and an ally, but as a pawn to be ordered around in pursuit of their vision of a Middle East peace agreement. In his first week in office, Obama signaled his Palestinian sympathies by authorizing $20 million in aid to help the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip recover from damage caused in an Israeli offensive provoked by Hamas rocket fire into Israel.
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In his second week, Palestinian Authority officials, after meeting with Obama’s Mideast envoy, George Mitchell, said they believed that under Obama the Palestinians could extract from Israel much bigger concessions than under previous administrations, and that Obama wanted to see Israel withdraw from nearly the entire West Bank.
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This indicated Obama sought even more Israeli concessions than were made at Bill Clinton’s Camp David summit in 2000—concessions which then-Palestinian leader Yassir Arafat rejected in favor of a new war against Israel. A few months later, as a further sign Obama was moving the goalposts on Israel, the State Department ducked the question of whether it would honor a promise by the George W. Bush administration to former Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon that Israel would retain sovereignty over large Jewish areas in Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) if a new Palestinian state were created.
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A little over a month in office, Obama pledged more than $900 million—not just $20 million—to rebuild Gaza
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and to shore up the Palestinian Authority. The stated purpose was to strengthen Palestinian moderates to facilitate the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, but experts warned the aid could be diverted to Hamas and other terrorist groups. Additionally, UNRWA, the main UN body administering this aid, is widely considered corrupt, it operates without internal or external audits, and it is known to be infiltrated by Hamas supporters and other radicals. As Republican congressman Mark Kirk noted, “To route $900 million to this area, and let’s say that Hamas was only able to steal 10 percent of that, we would still become Hamas’s second-largest funder after Iran.”
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Shortly thereafter, in an abrupt change of tone from her pro-Israel declarations when she was senator of New York, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton angered Jewish leaders by denouncing Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in Gaza. For some observers, Clinton’s condemnation brought back memories of her controversial kiss of Yassir Arafat’s wife Suha, after Suha had unleashed a shocking anti-Israel tirade, including outlandish accusations that Israel was poisoning the Palestinian water supply and attacking Palestinians with poison gas. Some Jewish leaders wondered out loud “who the real Hillary Clinton is.” One said, “She is pro-Palestinian 100 percent, really. Of course, we always knew it.”
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In March, the United States returned to the UN Human Rights Council, which it had left nine months earlier primarily because the Bush administration objected to its obsessive focus on denouncing Israel while overlooking the horrific abuses that occur every day in the Middle East’s assorted dictatorships.
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Also in March, tension arose between the United States and Israel following a surprise visit by Hillary Clinton to Israel, where she was once again “highly critical” of the Jewish state, this time over the demolition of Palestinian homes in Eastern Jerusalem. Israel strongly defended its actions, insisting they were a matter of law enforcement that had been approved following a hearing at the Israeli Supreme Court.

By April, reporters were asking the question, “Can Israel still call the United States its best international friend?” Israel’s primary security threat is Iran’s ambition to get a nuclear weapon—a logical focus in light of the Iranian president’s vow to wipe Israel off the map—but White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel told Israeli leaders if they wanted to defuse the Iranian threat they better start evacuating settlements in the West Bank. This drew accusations that the Obama administration was exploiting Israeli anxiety about Iran’s nuclear ambitions to pressure Israel into making more concessions to the Palestinians.

Meanwhile, the administration canceled a scheduled meeting between Obama and Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and announced it would end Bush’s tradition of hosting Israeli prime ministers whenever they were in town. Adding to Israel’s unease, Obama demanded a complete settlement freeze in the West Bank and reversed the Bush policy of opposing Hamas’ inclusion in a future Palestinian government.
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The administration’s dictatorial tone continued with Mideast envoy George Mitchell’s assertion, after meeting with Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas, that a “two-state solution is the only solution” to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This was an unmistakable rebuke of Netanyahu, who had shortly beforehand expressed his misgivings to Mitchell about Palestinian statehood. More significant, Mitchell adopted the controversial 2002 Arab peace initiative, which called for Israel to withdraw from Eastern Jerusalem, the entire West Bank, and the Golan Heights, and to accept the influx of millions of foreign Arabs as Israeli citizens as part of the “right of return,” in exchange for promises of peace with the Arab world. Mitchell proclaimed, as if wholly ignoring any Israeli aspirations or security concerns, “The U.S. is committed to the establishment of a sovereign, independent Palestinian state, where the aspirations of the Palestinian people to control their own destiny are realized. We want the Arab peace initiative to be a part of the effort to reach this goal.”
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Unsurprisingly, a PA negotiator reportedly declared that President Obama was intent on creating a Palestinian state “more quickly than anybody could imagine.”
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The administration also irked Israel when they cavalierly rejected Netanyahu’s insistence that the Palestinians recognize Israel as the state of the Jewish people as a condition to renewing peace talks.
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Administration demands on Israel persisted with the U.S. State Department’s command that Israel engage in negotiations with Syria, one of the primary sponsors (along with Iran) of the Hezbollah terrorist group. This was just two days after Syrian foreign minister Walid Muallem praised a speech by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in which the Iranian leader called the Israeli government “the most cruel and repressive racist regime.”
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INTENSE AND UNPRECEDENTED PRESSURE

In May, Rahm Emanuel upped the ante against Israel. Whereas the administration had been linking U.S. pressure against Iran to Israel’s discontinuation of West Bank settlements, it now took the position that America’s ability to confront Iran was solely dependent on progress toward creating a Palestinian state.
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Reports also surfaced in May that Obama’s nuclear arms reduction efforts “threatened to expose and derail a 40-year-old secret U.S. agreement to shield Israel’s nuclear weapons from international scrutiny by pressuring Israel to join the Non-Proliferation Treaty, which would require Israel to declare and relinquish its nuclear arsenal.”
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The United States joined Britain, Russia, France, and China in voicing support for making the Middle East a nuclear-weapons-free zone. This would ultimately force Israel to surrender what is perhaps its biggest deterrent against another Arab invasion—its never-declared nuclear arsenal.
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Identifying the apparent goal underlying all of Obama’s policy reversals, journalist Caroline Glick reported in the
Jerusalem Post
on May 8 that U.S. national security adviser James Jones “told a European foreign minister that the US is planning to build an anti-Israel coalition with the Arabs and Europe to compel Israel to surrender Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem to the Palestinians.”
Haaretz
, wrote Glick, had quoted Jones in a classified foreign ministry cable as saying, “The new administration will convince Israel to compromise on the Palestinian question. We will not push Israel under the wheels of a bus, but we will be more forceful toward Israel than we have been under Bush.”

This was consistent with earlier reports that the United States supported the 2002 Arab peace initiative, whose “right of return” clause, Glick observed, would mean “Israel would effectively cease to be a Jewish state.”
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This, of course, is precisely the Palestinians’ goal, which is why they refused Netanyahu’s insistence on recognizing Israel as a state of the Jewish people.

Author Joel Rosenberg similarly reported that his sources were telling him the Obama administration had been “applying intense and unprecedented pressure on the Netanyahu government to make huge unilateral concessions to the Palestinians even before direct peace talks begin.” Obama had even contacted the leaders of Germany, Britain, and France to get each to agree to the strategy. But

Netanyahu held his ground.
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Indeed, in a speech marking the annual Jerusalem Day, Netanyahu insisted that Jerusalem would always remain united under Israeli sovereignty—a contradiction of the 2002 Arab peace plan, which called for Israel to surrender Eastern Jerusalem to the Palestinians. “United Jerusalem is Israel’s capital,” said Netanyahu. “Jerusalem was always ours and will always be ours. It will never again be partitioned and divided.”
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Meanwhile, as his efforts to end Iran’s nuclear program foundered, Obama sternly warned Netanyahu against Israel’s exercising its own self-defense by attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities.
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A few weeks later, Hillary Clinton delivered another harsh warning from Obama for Israel to halt all construction in settlements on the West Bank. “He wants to see a stop to settlements—not some settlements, not outposts, not ‘natural growth’ exceptions,” said Clinton, who indicated she had communicated that message “very clearly.” This was an in-your-face rebuke to Israel, which had recently told the administration it wanted to preserve the right to undertake some limited new construction in West Bank settlements.
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Aaron David Miller, who served under both Democratic and Republican administrations, told AFP that Obama’s toughness against Israel was “almost unprecedented” and represented “something of a radical break with past administrations.”
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WorldNetDaily
reported that just days after Netanyahu’s speech, the Obama administration told the Palestinian Authority Jerusalem could not remain united under Israeli sovereignty. A top PA official said the United States was cooperating with the PA to “thwart Israel’s plans in Jerusalem.” This report was consistent with the State Department, just one day earlier, saying the future status of Jerusalem would be determined through peace negotiations—a contradiction of Netanyahu’s vow that Jerusalem would “never be divided.”
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Obama then met with Palestinian president Abbas, whose adviser, Nimer Hamad, reported that Obama “was very friendly to the position of the PA” and had told Abbas that the United States foresees the creation of a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital, which Obama said was “in the American national and security interest.” Another PA official reportedly said that Obama informed Abbas that he would not let Netanyahu “get in the way” of normalizing U.S. relations with the Arab and greater Muslim world.
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