Harper leads, Obama stumbles in the Middle East

Posted on August 5, 2014 by ArchitectGuy

CANADA FREE PRESS
by Jason Stverak
August 4, 2014

Harper-Obama-tell-truth (1)

If you’re pro-Israel and you back President Barack Obama, you’ve had a lousy month. The president’s backing for Israel in its war with the terror group Hamas has been palpably tepid. Israel has the right to defend itself has become the mantra of the administration, but it has been entwined in so many contradictions that it now lacks credibility. Consider :

1. Weeks earlier, the Obama administration had openly supported the Palestinian unity government that included Hamas, whose charter calls for both the destruction of Israel specifically and Jews generally.
 
2. From the onset of the current conflict, the Obama administration has worked with the Turkey and Qatar, both adversaries of the Jewish state, to call for an immediate cease fire. In the face of Israeli intelligence about Hamas’ planned operation to kill large numbers of Israeli civilians on the high holy days of the Jewish New Year, saying Israel has a right to defend itself but not permitting it to finish the mission to accomplish this is an act of whimsy – or pure hypocrisy.
 
3. The Federal Aviation Administration issued an unprecedented ban on American flights to Tel Aviv, even as flights continued to Ukraine, where a passenger jet had been downed and two military jets were shot down just days later. Active war zones like Baghdad and Damascus continued to receive American flights. The obvious conclusion: the administration was using Israel’s economic vulnerability during the height of the tourist season to bend Israel to its will.

4. And then there was John Kerry’s original ceasefire plan, which would have saved Hamas from the might of the Israeli military and handed Hamas what it wanted. The deal was so pro-Hamas that some observers quipped that Khaled Mashal, the leader of Hamas, probably wrote it while waiting out the conflict in his five-star Qatar hotel and faxed it to Kerry.

The Israeli cabinet, usually incapable of agreeing on when the Sabbath begins, rejected Kerry’s plan 19-0, and the plan drew fire from the Palestinian Authority and Egypt. Kerry had achieved a diplomatic miracle: he had devised something on which the PA, Egypt, and Israel could all agree. The plan was a disaster that only benefited Hamas.

“It’s as if he isn’t the foreign minister of the world’s most powerful nation, but an alien, who just disembarked his spaceship in the Mideast,” wrote David Ravid. As the diplomatic correspondent for the far-left Ha’aretz, Ravid’s remarks had to be especially painful for the Obama administration’s liberal supporters……

http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/65057
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