It was necessary to cast J-Street as pro-Israel so the term had to be redefined. Thomas Friedman, Jeffrey Goldberg and Jeremy Ben-Ami each took up the challenge. I took their arguments to task in my post “Redefining What It Means to be Pro-Israel.”
Thus, the groundwork was laid for Obama’s “tough love”. He is not just undermining and weakening Israel in the name of being “pro-Israel” he is also attempting to undermine the support of the American people for Israel by suggesting that a settlement of the dispute satisfactory to the Arabs is in America’s strategic interest or that Israel’s intransigence is costing “US blood and treasure.”
The object of his exercise is to develop “normal US relations with Arab and Muslim countries,” as the paper sets out.
Obama did not wait for his planned attack on Israel to begin doing so. His first telephone call after his inauguration was to Mahmoud Abbas. His first foreign visit was to Egypt in June 2009 where he delivered his Cairo speech, titled “A New Beginning,” in which he praised Islam and the Muslim Brotherhood in an unprecedented and an ahistorical manner.
Contrary to the wishes of Mubarak, Obama insisted that the Muslim Brotherhood be invited notwithstanding that Mubarak had banned them. Mubarak himself chose not to attend. A year and a half year later, Obama threw Mubarak under the bus and supported the Muslim Brotherhood’s takeover of Egypt.
In 2011, Obama joined forces with Qatar and Saudi Arabia in order to bring down secular Gadaffi of Libya. He was killed later in the year. According to the Telegraph UK the Muslim Brotherhood expects to take power in this week’s upcoming elections just as their counterparts did in Tunisia and Egypt.
In line with all these moves, Obama has embraced Islamist Erdogan as his new best friend despite the fact that Erdogan has moved Turkey from being a friend of Israel to being a vociferous enemy of Israel, Barry Rubin wonders why:
The fundamental problem with Erdogan is despite being embraced by the United States, he is an enemy of the United States, the West more generally, and Israel. He is on the side of radical, anti-American Islamists who want to wipe Israel off the map. So angry and passionate is Erdogan’s loathing of Israel that the leader of the opposition mockingly but pointedly asked if the prime minister wanted to go to war with the Jewish state.
In contrast, the list of Erdogan’s dearest friends includes Hamas, Hizballah, Iran, the repressive Sudanese dictatorship, and Syria (formerly the regime there; now the Islamist portions of the opposition).
It should be no surprise to Rubin because that’s where Obama has been positioning the US.
Erdogan is no longer friends with Syria or Iran and is working with Obama to topple the secular Assad of Syria and replace him with another MB government under his wing. This objective is proving harder than originally thought, even with the considerable assistance of Qatar and Saudi Arabia.
It would appear then that Obama is succeeding in his goal of achieving normal relations with the Arab world by giving it what it wants. But the MB is not kowtowing to him as he might have expected. The tail is wagging the dog.
Not only has he embraced the MB abroad he has embraced them at home also. So much so, that a stalwart five Congressmen, led by Rep Michelle Bachmann, asked for an investigation of whether US security was jeopardized as a result. They received no support and were attacked for so doing even by their own party. Apparently the establishment of both parties is not prepared to challenge Obama on his new found friend”.
For some 12 years now, the Organization of the Islamic Countries (OIC) has been pushing the UN to criminalize the defamation of religion. The U.S. resisted such blandishments and defended free speech. In March of last year, a compromise was arrived at. Resolution 16/18 of the Human Rights Council which deplores religious intolerance but doesn’t limit speech, was passed. This was a vast improvement over the demand to criminalize defamation of religion. The US should have left it at that. Instead she hosted a conference in December of last year on measures to combat religious “intolerance, negative stereotyping and stigmatization” thereby putting the whole matter in play again. No matter how you slice it, any “measures” will involve the limiting of free speech.
