Gaffney tells it like it is with Obama. But he doesn’t comment on how it was without Obama, at least up to now. America keeps pushing the “peace process”. Neither party will compromise. What’s America do? Walk away? I hardly think so not after the US has followed an agenda without letup since before Israel issued its Declaration of Independence, of favouring no Israel or at least a shrunken one. Will the America of the future abandon that policy? I hope so. Maybe Pres Palin will shake things up.”
Obama plans to trade Israel’s support for Palestine’s
By Frank J. Gaffney Jr., Washington Times
Earlier this year, President Obama drove U.S.-Israeli relations – to use one of President Obama’s oft-employed analogies – into a ditch. Arguably, ties between the two countries were never more strained than last spring when Mr. Obama serially insulted the elected leader of Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, vilified his country and tried to euchre it into making territorial, political and other ill-advised concessions to Arabs determined as ever to destroy the Jewish state. Unfortunately, what the president has in mind for Israel after the election next week will make his previous treatment of the Jewish state look like the good old days.
To be sure, ties between the United States and Israel – far and away America’s most important and loyal friend in the Middle East – have improved lately from the nadir to which Mr. Obama plunged them since he took office. That has nothing to do, however, with a change of heart or agenda on the part of the president and his administration.
Rather, it is a reflection of a cynical calculation forced upon the Obama White House by its panicked congressional allies. Already laboring under the backbreaking burden of their association with a president and his agenda that have become huge liabilities, Democrats on Capitol Hill faced wholesale defections of their Jewish constituents and funders if their party’s leader persisted in his assault on Israel. Public letters and private conversations had the desired effect: Mr. Obama began treating his Israeli counterpart with a modicum of respect and the optics of a restarted peace process – however short-lived or doomed – helped conjure up an image of a renewed partnership between the two nations.
Make no mistake about it, though: Once the 2010 elections are behind him, it is a safe bet that Mr. Obama will revert to form by once again exhibiting an unmistakable and ruthless determination to bend Israel to his will.
Worse yet, he will be able to take advantage of a vehicle for effecting the so-called “two-state solution,” no matter how strenuously Israel and its friends in Washington object. The Palestinians will unilaterally declare themselves a state and ask for international recognition, and Mr. Obama will accede to that request.
A number of the particulars involved in this gambit are unclear at the moment. For example, will the Palestinians announce the borders of their state to be the 1967 cease-fire lines, in which case large Israeli population centers (defined as “settlements”) will be inside a nation that is certain to be, to use Hitler’s phrase, Judenrein (free of Jews)? How will the Hamas-stan of Gaza be connected to the currently PLO-run West Bank – in a way that will make them “contiguous” without bisecting the Jewish state and ensuring that Hamas does not take over the rest of the so-called “Palestinian Authority?”
Also unclear is precisely how Mr. Obama will handle the sticky issue of extending U.S. recognition of Palestine. Will he want to parallel Harry Truman’s direct and immediate endorsement of the establishment of Israel in 1948? Or will he do it more disingenuously, as former U.N. Ambassador John R. Bolton speculated in the Wall Street Journal last week, by having the U.S. abstain from an approving vote by the U.N. Security Council. The hope behind the latter would be that Team Obama and its partisans will somehow avoid retribution from Israel’s friends, both Democrats and others, here and abroad.
The truth is that, either way, Mr. Obama will have dealt Israel a potentially mortal blow. Without control of the high ground and water aquifers of the West Bank, the Jewish state is simply indefensible and unsustainable.
Some suggest that international forces (perhaps led by America) should be deployed in the areas Jews have historically known as Judea and Samaria so as to ensure that they are not used to harm Israelis in the low-lying areas to the west.
We have seen how such arrangements work in practice in Lebanon, though – which is to say not well.
In southern Lebanon, U.N. “peacekeepers” have merely wound up protecting Israel’s enemies, notably Hezbollah, as such foes of both the Jewish state and our own have amassed immense amounts of missiles and other arms and prepared to resume hostilities against Israel at a moment of that Iranian-backed terrorist group’s choosing (or, more precisely, that of their sponsors in Tehran). The same is certain to eventuate in the West Bank as paramilitary forces the United States has foolishly trained and equipped become a standing army and fall under the sway of Hamas.
Such a “two-state solution” will make another regional war vastly more likely rather than preventing it. Yet, the Obama administration is committed to pursuing that goal as Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton made excruciatingly clear in a pandering speech to the American Task Force on Palestine last week.
Among other ominous comments, she declared that “the World Bank recently reported that if the Palestinian Authority maintains its momentum in building institutions and delivering public services, it is, and I quote, ‘well-positioned for the establishment of a state at any point in the near future.’ ” She seemed determined in particular to emphasize the last seven words.
Voters need to know now whether Mr. Obama and those in Congress who support his agenda are determined to help Israel’s enemies destroy her – not find out that is the case after the elections.
Frank J. Gaffney Jr. is president of the Center for Security Policy, a columnist for The Washington Times and host of the nationally syndicated program “Secure Freedom Radio,” heard in Washington weeknights at 9 p.m. on WRC 1260 AM.
Perhaps this priestly pronouncement is less significant than Israpundit and its commenters believe.
In The Spectator, Melanie Phillips covers this priest and the replacement theology he was spewing. She begins as follows:
She then demolishes this whole line of argument. The rest is worth reading but I skip including it here for the sake of (relative) brevity.
One of the commenters, MartinT, says flatly that the priest’s announcment indicated nothing about the Church and its position on Israel:
Someone with more knowledge of Catholicism than me would be a better judge, but this does suggest that there was less to the priest’s announcement than your first reading indicated.
Ted, accepted.
Listen Catholics are ashamed of the priest who commit these crimes, they hurt the church and likewise the good priest. We are appalled by the actions of the church to shuttle them around and hide them. They should be removed at once, no and if’s or buts. Our diocese just removed 2 this past month. Unfortunately the Catholic Church is large and since priest exercise celibacy gays are attracted to the priesthood. If a minister of protestant church doesn’t marry he becomes suspect while priest don’t have that problem.
With respects to the actions of the Pope and higher hierarchy of the church, it has to be noted that Catholics are not responsible as these bishops, cardinals and the pope are not elected by us. Catholics are not always in tune with what they do or say.
I assure you most Catholics are not happy with the Pope’s actions towards Israel.
Gaffney presents a face of Obama that is ominous and menacing towards Israel. Gaffney is just one of many such pundits. Perhaps such pundits are getting through to many of the very liberal Jews who supported Obama. Perhaps liberal Jews, so mesmerized by Obama are coming out of their trance and seeing Obama for what he is.
Perhaps both factors are operating to account for the polls that suggest American Jewish support for Obama has declined from 78% in the last presidential election to the 40% plus range now.
What is puzzling however, is why that Jewish support for Obama is still as high as the 40% range.
With Jewish support for Obama reducing, it seems there has been and there remains an opportunity for those Jews who have seen Obama in an anti-Israel light to have, in a more organized fashion, to more aggressively and effectively gone after the remaining 40% of American Jews supporting Obama and turn them away from him.
That has not happened, at least not in the way and to the extent possible.
Jews as part of and just like the American people have many reasons to distance themselves from Obama and the Democrats, which reasons lay in the injurious consequences of Obama’s policies and legislative agenda passed into law to the economy, jobs, health care, political partisanship and social divisiveness along racial/ethnic lines and the like.
Jews can and should join their fellow dissatisfied and disgruntled Americans for all those reasons. Jews however, have one more significant bone to pick with Obama and that is his policies that negatively impact Israel directly or indirectly. To that end, those who see Obama as being bad news for Israel should be doubling and redoubling efforts to reduce Jewish support for Obama to single digits.
I don’t see that concerted effort materializing in spite of the momentum such an effort would have given the growing American disenchantment and dislike for Obama’s policies across the board.
Rongrand, I owe you an apology. I forgot to delete Malibou’s bigoted and insulting comment also.
But more important the question of pedophelia in the Church I am sure, concerns Catholics like yourself much more so than it does outsiders. It is never right to condems Catholics in general for the sins of the Church. He personally attacked you and you have every right to defend yourself anywhere and particularily on Israpundit and to use whatever crudities you want. You are a friend of Israel and Jews. Only a bigot would say otherwise.
My intention was to delete the provocation first and foremost and all responses thereto.
Thanks Ted for allowing me to defend myself. I should know better.
Its all about saving face even when its wrong. I just had a HORRIFIC incident myself today.
Yes malibu we know:
http://frontpagemag.com/2010/01/14/muslim-child-brides-in-britain-by-hege-storhaug/
Laura your right on she and Bill are snakes and use to pony up to Arafat (the terrorist, thief and scumbag). If you notice, and I could be wrong it appears as though BHO is clipping her wings. I believe he is afraid she will resign soon and her and Bill will start to campaign early for her run in 2012.
Laura you know I have said it many times but a majority of Americans do not know the truth about the treatment of Israel by our own government.
I have been advocating for a super strong PR program to bring the truth to Americans. Truth not being told by the liberal left media in our country. What is troubling is the liberal American Jews don’t seem to be upset over it.
How about the truth concerning the Palestinians and their so called rights to the Holy Lands. There are enough articles written about them and all state they are nothing more than Jordanian and rejects from other Arab nations with no legal or any other rights to the Holy Land. The Jews have G-d given rights and that can’t be revoked.
Basically they are a anti-Semitic tool used against Israel by those who want to kill Jews and destroy Israel
Israel is our only trusted and true friend in the ME and if anyone thinks Saudi Arbia, Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Hezzbullah run Lebanon can be counted as such forget it. You can trust them as far as you can throw a camel (not the cigarette).
In addition, everyone of these share the same common goal, destroy the Jewish Nation and screw the US.
Our government is so contaminated with anti-Semitism it sucks.
I may be in over my head but I don’t see it any other way.
Ever since she became Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton is showing her true colors regarding Israel which she had to keep hidden during her time as a NY Senator. She obediently does the bidding of obama in aiding the jihad against Israel.