Tuesday, May 12, 2009

Obama's signal to Israel: Submit











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Dear Solsticewitch13,

Every President’s administration sends signals about its
foreign policy intentions by the people the President selects and the
various statements they make.

The Obama administration’s
intentions are becoming clearer and clearer to discern. The message to the
world: America has been arrogant. The message to Muslims: America has been
arrogant. The message to Israel: See below.

There is a difference
between acknowledging mistakes and communicating weakness. The Obama
administration is, unfortunately, repeatedly communicating weakness to
those who mean us harm. One could understand pursuing such a policy if
there were historical precedent for it actually working. If the goal of
the Obama administration is to secure lasting peace in the Middle East
that includes safety and security for Israel, and if its goal is to secure
peaceful co-existence with radical Islamists, the paths he is following
will fail.

Not because any of us wishes they would fail, but
because, as George Santayana wrote, “He who does not know history is
condemned to repeat it.” We’re reasonably sure most Brits wanted Neville
Chamberlain to succeed when he declared after his meeting with Hitler that
he had secured “peace in our time.” Why did he fail? Because he refused to
acknowledge the reality of the evil he was dealing with and deluded
himself into believing such evil could be appeased with accommodations and
concessions.








Obama's Signal to
Israel: Submit


By Mona Charen


May 12, 2009 / 18 Iyar 5769
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/charen051209.php3

http://www.jewishworldreview.com/
In early April, Vice President Biden was asked if the
administration was concerned that Israel might strike at Iran's nuclear
facilities. "I don't believe Prime Minister Netanyahu would do that," Mr.
Biden replied. "I think he would be ill advised to do that."

A few
weeks later, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton explained the
administration's solution to the threat of an Iranian bomb: "For Israel to
get the kind of strong support it's looking for vis-a-vis Iran, it can't
stay on the sideline with respect to the Palestinians and the peace
efforts … they go hand in hand."

And on May 10, National Security
Adviser James Jones spelled it out further: "We understand Israel's
preoccupation with Iran as an existential threat. We agree with that. … By
the same token, there are a lot of things that you can do to diminish that
existential threat by working hard towards achieving a two-state
solution."

By what reasoning has the administration decided that
pushing Israel to permit a new Palestinian state would — in any way —
diminish the threat from Iran? Do they believe that Iran's (or I should
say the Iranian leadership's) genocidal hostility toward Israel is the
result of lack of progress toward an independent Palestinian state in the
West Bank and Gaza? Will the Iranian leadership, which has characterized
Israel as a "cancerous tumor," declared that "Israel must be wiped off the
map," and promised that "Israel is destined for destruction and will soon
disappear" is going to change its mind if Israel enters into negotiations
with the Palestinians?

"Obama will be a great friend to Israel."
So said a Jewish Democrat in a pre-election debate with me. I asked her
whether she had any hesitations about someone who had been steeped in
academic pieties and Hyde Park leftwing intellectual fashions, and who had
tamely absorbed the Rev. Wright's sermons for 20 years? Her response was
to mouth some of the platitudes about support for Israel that were to be
found on the Obama campaign's website. I wonder if she is having doubts
now.

Does it give her pause that Rose Gottemoeller, assistant
secretary of state and America's chief nuclear arms negotiator, has called
on Israel (along with Pakistan, India, and North Korea) to sign the
Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty? By including Israel on a list of nations
known to either have nuclear weapons or be close to acquiring them, the
Obama administration is introducing a sinister note of moral equivalence
to the problem of nuclear weapons in the Middle East. All previous U.S.
governments have implicitly accepted that Israel's nuclear weapons pose a
threat to no nation and are maintained only to deter Israel's enemies from
genocidal attacks.

Like other liberals, my debate opponent
probably believes that Obama's apology tour of global capitals was pitch
perfect. Of course, it's one thing for the United States, still the
world's superpower, to delude itself that winning international popularity
contests will make us safer (though it's a dangerous delusion), but
Israel, which always sits inches from the precipice of destruction, cannot
afford such fantasies at all.

We have recent history to guide us.
In 2000, Israel withdrew from the security corridor it had established in
southern Lebanon. The world had long been clamoring for Israel to do this.
The Iranian-sponsored Hezbollah movement immediately seized the area —
trumpeting its triumph in driving out the enemy. In 2006, southern Lebanon
became the launching pad for Hezbollah's missile campaign against northern
Israel.

Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005. The Iranian-backed
Hamas movement moved quickly and took control there (not without
significant internecine bloodshed with Fatah), and again used the
territory not to build a peaceful Palestinian enclave but to launch 10,000
missiles against southern Israel.

Fatah (which is called moderate
because it wants to destroy Israel on the installment plan rather than all
at once) retains tenuous control of the West Bank. But even Mahmoud Abbas
admits that if Israel were to withdraw completely from the area, Hamas
would gain control in a heartbeat.

Next week, Prime Minister
Netanyahu will meet with President Obama in Washington. It is hard to see
how this relationship can go well. President Obama has sent abundant
signals that his foreign policy is 50 percent wishful thinking and 50
percent leftwing mush. There may not be any easy answers to the problem of
a nuclear Iran. But pressuring Israel to take suicidal risks is clearly
the worst possible approach. Iran will conclude, as its proxies Hezbollah
and Hamas at various times concluded, that force and the threat of force
work.


If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are
intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against
the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and
tolerance with them. … We should therefore claim, in the name of
tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. –Sir Karl Popper




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