Onama Destabilizes Mideast, Then Warns Israel Not To
IBDEditorials.com
Family and friends of Eyal Yifrah, Gilad Shaar, and Naftali Fraenkel, three Israeli teenagers who were abducted over two weeks ago, mourn during their funeral in Modiin, Israel.
Middle East: Was it a tasteless self-parody when President Obama urged Israel not to "destabilize the situation" after three kidnapped teens were found murdered by Hamas? He is the destabilizer.
One can imagine the average Israeli snapping, "Spare us," upon hearing Barack Obama talk about how "as a father, I cannot imagine the indescribable pain that the parents of these teenage boys are experiencing."
For more than five years, Obama's radical Mideast policies have threatened the future of every teenager within what is now, with Iraq crumbling under the same policies, again the region's only free country.
The president's 2009 Cairo University overture helped open the door to revolution and upheaval. Now his reaction to Hamas' murder of three kidnapped Israeli youth, one a U.S. citizen, is to "urge all parties to refrain from steps that could further destabilize the situation," claiming that Israelis "have the full support and friendship of the United States."
How can he can say that with a straight face? Lessening U.S. support for the Jewish state is the most obvious facet of Obama's Mideast reset.
Take the U.S.-led "peace framework" talks that broke down earlier this year. The apparent idea was to give the Palestinian Authority unprecedented concessions, then dangle releasing convicted Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard before Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the hope that he would fold.
Long before that was Obama's out-of-the-blue declaration in 2011 that Israel should be shrunk back to its indefensible 1967 borders. That was when Obama warned Israel, "the status quo is unsustainable," declared, "the international community is tired of an endless process that never produces an outcome" and claimed, "the dream of a Jewish and democratic state cannot be fulfilled with permanent occupation."
But the dream of a Jewish state with the values and freedoms of Western civilization has been a concrete reality for some 65 years — because of a robust Israeli military backed by the U.S.
Was it an "endless process that never produces an outcome" when the U.S. was, for all purposes, permanently occupying Europe as part of NATO in the post-war era, to prevent Soviet expansionism?
What Obama today berates as an unproductive "process" is a free country surrounded by savage enemies simply engaging in its own defense. If "the international community" doesn't like that, let them see how long their way of life would last surrounded unarmed by Islamic countries.
Most threatening of all, however, is Obama's appeasement of Iran, imagining that Islamofascist fanatics can be talked into abandoning their nuclear weapons ambitions.
Iran has what former U.N. weapons inspector Michael Elleman calls "the largest and most diverse ballistic missile arsenal in the Middle East." When it can nuke Tel Aviv, President Obama's inability to "imagine the indescribable pain" will take on a different meaning.