I previously posted about the latest rash of scandalous photos coming out of Afghanistan showing U.S. military atrocities under Obama’s command, and wondering if the media would pick up on it the way they did when it was Bush’s army… Well, here’s a twist I wasn’t expecting: yes, one of the U.S. media, Rolling Stone, [...]
Jeffrey Goldberg, a correspondent for the Atlantic, cast a spotlight on yet another disgustingly overt example of pure bias in the mainstream media, particularly at the anti-Semitic Reuters newswire. He points to a Reuters news item which contains the following despicable sentences: Police said it was a “terrorist attack” — Israel’s term for a Palestinian [...]
In the [sparse] reporting of the Palestinians’ massacre of the Fogel family, several newspapers stand out with their distorted sense of “balance”, i.e., where they feel overwhelmingly uncomfortable describing the barbarity of the Palestinians without at least taking a swipe or two at the Israelis, no matter how patently irrelevant or disgustingly disrespectful it comes [...]
Obama Painting Himself Into A Corner
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Jackson Diehl, the Deputy Editorial Page Editor of the Washington Post—and not exactly a close friend of Israel, wrote a great editorial in Monday’s Post urging Obama to “end the spat with Israel”.
The situation is one in which Obama is painting himself into a corner with his anti-settlement rhetoric, and the more adamant his position becomes the tougher it’ll be for him later when he tries to extricate himself from those positions.
(Of course, he may not have any interest in ever extricating himself from those positions, in which case we can kiss any good relationship with Israel goodbye.)
The reason for this is that Israel cannot and will not ever budge from natural growth in some of the settlements. If they were to follow Obama’s demands to the letter, that would mean they cannot even renovate a home in the Jewish quarter of Jerusalem!
This position is therefore one which will never be supported by enough Israeli cabinet members or members of the knesset to make a difference. And, by making his demands more than once—personally, as well as through other members of his administration, like Secretary of State Hillary Clinton—he is putting himself in a position to either look weak later by backpedaling on those demands or to reneg on his campaign promises—not to mention change the course of a long history of U.S.-Israeli relations—and sever ties with Israel.
Another compelling reason that Diehl makes for Obama to quickly end this showdown is that it basically gives the Palestinians yet another “free pass” to sit back and do nothing. As long as they’re watching the “U.S. versus Israel” showdown, they can continue to breach every agreement as they’ve been doing all along, but now with a new excuse in their arsenal: “we’re not stopping terrorism because we’re still waiting for Israel to stop building” (as though there is even any moral equivalence… but that’s another whole issue…).
It should be very interesting to see how this ends…