
Ellis Washington
President Obama gave the worst anti-Israel speech of any American president I can remember.
– John Bolton, Former U.S. ambassador to the U.N.
The speech was good and positive for Israel and for moving the peace process forward.
–Benjamin Netanyahu, prime minister of Israel
How can Bolton and Netanyahu, two seemingly rational, educated and intellectual men hear President Obama’s U.N. speech Wednesday and come to such diametrical opposite conclusions? Both men proudly claim that they are conservatives; both men claim that they believe in a strong, independent, defensible Israel with an indivisible capital at Jerusalem. Answer: One man is a statesman like Sir Winston Churchill; the other is a politician, an appeaser like Neville Chamberlain.
Obama’s speech was delivered with the dispassionate indifference of a man who was handed a speech others wrote for him and loaded into his teleprompter for him to read like a robot, yet the devil is always in the details. Here are some of the highlights of Obama’s U.N. speech:
The time has come to relaunch negotiations – without preconditions – that address the permanent-status issues: security for Israelis and Palestinians; borders, refugees and Jerusalem. …
This paragraph could just as easily been written by Col. Moammar Gadhafi who ranted and raved for 100 minutes before the U.N. assembly and affectionately called President Obama “my brother.” Obama’s U.N. speech could have been written by a whole host of enemies of Israel – Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinians; Khaled Mashal, the Gaza leader of the terrorist organization Hamas; Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah terrorist group occupying Lebanon.
What does Obama mean by “the time has come to relaunch negotiations”? This guy is such a narcissist that he thinks whenever he does something, like trying to broker a peace deal between the Israelis and the Palestinians, that he is the first leader to attempt it. Every U.S. president since Harry Truman in the late 1940s have in one way or another tried and failed to “relaunch” peace in the Middle East.
Obama wants there to be “negotiations without preconditions.” That statement is oxymoronic. All legitimate negotiations between parties done in good faith must set reasonable preconditions. For example, the Palestinians (and all Arab and Muslim nations) must accept the irrevocable fact that Israel is a legitimate nation-state with the right to exist in peace. The Palestinians and the 44 Muslim nations have been fighting against that simple precondition for 65 years.
President Obama further stated:
The goal is clear: two states living side by side in peace and security – a Jewish state of Israel, with true security for all Israelis. …
Can anyone name any place on the planet where a nation has a divided capital and is living in peace and security? Washington, D.C., London, Paris, Moscow, Beijing, Berlin, Riyadh, Tehran, Baghdad? To demand that any of these countries divide their capital in half and give one half to their largest ethnic minority group would be tantamount to that country committing genocide against itself, yet for over 40 years this is the untenable position the world has placed on the backs of the Israelis. Obama further emphasized his anti-sovereignty point when he arrogantly declared in his U.N. speech that “America does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements.”
When Obama says, “… and a viable, independent Palestinian state with contiguous territory that ends the occupation that began in 1967 and realizes the potential of the Palestinian people,” he is using perhaps the most evil, anti-Semitic language I’ve ever heard from any American president against Israel. (“Contiguous” = unbroken “territory”; “occupation” = unlawful seizure of land). Obama seems to be demanding that Israel give back the land the Jews won in the 1967 war, a war fought and paid for by the blood of thousands of courageous Israeli soldiers and Jewish civilians. Following Obama’s perverse view of history, what nation on earth could lay legitimate claim to the land they presently have? There is not a place on earth where lands were not taken from another people but by force or war.
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