by David Horowitz & Jacob Laksin
2nd part of 3
The first sign of this shift was visible during a February 2008 presidential debate, when Obama sought to differentiate himself from Hillary Clinton, his then opponent and future secretary of state, by announcing that, unlike her, he would be willing to meet with hostile governments "without preconditions." It was a position he justified by asserting that it was critical for the United States to "talk to its enemies." This was a rare example of a campaign promise Obama has kept.
On entering the White House, Obama quickly moved to set a new tone toward the Arab and Muslim worlds. His very first call to a foreign leader from the Oval Office was to Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas, and it was not an effort to dissuade Abbas from his support for terrorism or his opposition to the existence of a Jewish state. One of the first interviews Obama gave as president, in January 2009, was to the Dubai-based television network Al-Arabiya. In it, Obama effectively offered an apology to the Arab world for alleged American misdeeds. He assured his interviewer that with him in charge Arab states could look to America as a friend. "My job to the Muslim world is to communicate that the Americans are not your enemy," Obama said, adding that the United States "sometimes makes mistakes. We have not been perfect."
It was the precursor of an extensive apology tour for America's sins around the world. In April 2009, he visited Turkey, a NATO ally that was rapidly — and alarmingly — becoming an Islamist state. Addressing its parliament, he hailed Turkey as a "true partner" and suggested that it was the United States that had been the faithless friend. In a not-so-oblique attack on President Bush, Obama expressed his regret for the "difficulties of these last few years," referring to a strain in relations caused by Turkey's refusal to allow American troops to deploy from Turkish soil during the war in Iraq. Obama lamented that the "trust that binds us has been strained, and I know that strain is shared in many places where the Muslim faith is practiced." In other words, Turkey's refusal to help America support the Muslim citizens of Iraq and topple a hated tyranny was a response to America's prejudice against Muslims.
In his review of past grievances, Obama did not mention the millions of Muslims — including Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza — who had cheered the 9/11 attacks on the United States by Islamic fanatics. Nor did he complain about the spread of anti-American and anti-Israeli conspiracy theories concerning those attacks in the Muslim world, including Turkey. As recently as 2008, polls found that as many Turks (39 percent) believed the United States or Israel was behind the 9/11 attacks as believed Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda were the culprits.
Even more worrisome, Obama used the occasion of his Turkish visit to break with the U.S. policy of treating countries that harbor terrorists as hostile nations. President Bush had declared that there would be no room for neutrality in the war against terror: "You are either with us or against us." But Obama now assured his listeners in Turkey and throughout the Muslim world that their governments no longer had to choose between America and al-Qaeda. "America's relationship with the Muslim world," Obama said, "cannot and will not be based on opposition to al-Qaeda."
Obama's pandering to Arab and Muslim sensibilities had already been embarrassingly on display a few days earlier, when he took the step, unprecedented for an American president, of making a deep bow to Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah, the ruler of a nation in which it is illegal to carry a Bible or build a church, and where women are not allowed to drive automobiles. The incident took place when President Obama attended the G-20 economic summit in London. When critics decried the president's subservient gesture to the Arab despot, the administration was caught by surprise and attempted to deny that it had ever taken place. Inconveniently for White House damage control, a video had captured Obama in full obeisant mode.
The shift in Washington's policy toward the Arab world reached a new level in Obama's speech in Cairo two months later. On the one hand, the president defended the U.S. military campaigns in the Middle East as driven by "necessity," condemned the Holocaust denial and Jew hatred that are rife in the Arab world (and promoted by its governments), and called on Palestinians to abandon violence against Israel. But these statements were accompanied by others that appear particularly troubling in the light of subsequent administration moves.
While Obama rightly condemned Holocaust denial, he left the impression that Israel's legitimacy derived solely from the legacy of European anti-Semitism and the Nazis' extermination of six million Jews. This echoed the Arab propaganda claim that Israel is a problem created by Europeans and unfairly imposed on the Arab world. Once again Obama was bolstering an Arab myth that serves to delegitimize the Jewish state.
The Holocaust is not merely a European legacy. Middle Eastern states such as Iraq and Iran actively sided with Hitler's armies; Arab generals served with Rommel, Hitler's commander in North Africa; and Arab leaders applauded and actively promoted the extermination of the Jews. The founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan al-Banna, was an admirer of Hitler and had Mein Kampf translated into Arabic in the 1930s as a text to guide his followers. Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and founder of Palestinian nationalism, was an active and vocal supporter of Hitler's "final solution" and spent the war years in Berlin recruiting Arabs to the Nazi cause. Al-Husseini, a man revered to this day in the West Bank and Gaza as the George Washington of a Palestinian state, organized anti-Jewish pogroms in the 1920s and 1930s, actively planned to build his own Auschwitz in the Middle East, and was thwarted only when Rommel was defeated at El-Alamein.
The Arab canard that Israel is Europe's attempt to unload its problem onto the backs of the Arabs ignores — as did Obama — the fact that Jerusalem has been the spiritual capital of the Jewish people for nearly 3,000 years and that Jews have lived in their historic homeland continuously for all that time. Jerusalem is at the center of the Jewish spiritual tradition, and Jews have been its largest religious community since 1864. Prime Minister Netanyahu was historically accurate when he admonished Obama, saying that "the Jewish people were building Jerusalem 3,000 years ago, and the Jewish people are building Jerusalem today. Jerusalem is not a settlement. It is our capital."
In his Cairo speech, Obama also showed little appreciation of the modern history of Israel, a nation that was not built on Arab — let alone "Palestinian" — land. The state of Israel was created out of the ruins of the Turkish empire.
In 1922, Great Britain created the state of Jordan out of 80 percent of the Palestine Mandate — a geographical, not an ethnic, designation. The territory in the Mandate had been part of the Turkish (not Arab) empire for the previous four hundred years. Then in 1948, a U.N. "partition plan" provided equal parts of the remaining Turkish land to Arabs and to Jews living on the banks of the Jordan River. In this plan, the Jews were assigned 10 percent of the original Palestine Mandate, while the Arabs received 90 percent. None of this land had belonged to a "Palestinian" nation or a Palestinian entity. In the previous 400 years there had never been a province of the Turkish empire called "Palestine." The entire region out of which Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank were created was known as "Ottoman Syria."
In what would prove to be a continuing pattern, the Jews accepted the partition's grossly unequal terms; their portion consisted of three unconnected slivers of land, of which 60 percent was arid desert. The Arabs, who had already received 80 percent of the Mandate land, rejected their additional portion, as they would continue to reject any arrangement that would allow for a Jewish state.
Immediately, five Arab nations launched a war against the Jews, who repelled the Arab attacks and established a Jewish state. When the fighting ended, the parts of the partitioned land that had been earmarked for the Arabs — namely, the West Bank and Gaza — were annexed by Jordan and Egypt, respectively, and disappeared from the map. There was no protest from the Arab world at the disappearance of "Palestine" into Jordan and Egypt, no Palestine Liberation Organization, no complaint to the U.N. The reason for the silence was that there was no Palestinian identity at the time, no movement for "self-determination," no "Palestinian" people to make a claim. There were Arabs who lived in the region of the Jordan. But they considered themselves inhabitants of Jordan or of the Syrian province of the former Ottoman Empire. The disappearance of the West Bank and Gaza was an annexation of Arab land by Arab states.
Arab and Western revisionists have turned this history on its head to portray the Jewish war of survival as a racist, imperialist plot to expel "Palestinians" from "Palestine." This is an utter distortion of the historical record. The term "Palestine Mandate" is a European reference to a geographical section of the defeated Turkish empire. The claim that there was a Palestinian nation from which ethnic Palestinians were expelled and which Israel now "occupies" illegally is a political lie.
In 1967, the Arab states attacked Israel again, with the express aim of "pushing the Jews into the sea." Again they were defeated. And once again defeat did not prompt the Arab states to make peace or to abandon their efforts to destroy Israel. At an August 1967 summit in Khartoum, Arab leaders declared that they would accept "no peace, no recognition, and no negotiations" with Israel. This is the permanent Arab war against Israel. It is a war driven by religious and ethnic hatred, which is the only durable cause of the conflict in the Middle East.
It is hardly surprising, given this historical reality, that Israel should regard with skepticism the Arab demands that Israel surrender territory — which it captured in defending itself against Arab aggression — in advance of a settlement that recognizes the existence of the Jewish state. As Netanyahu has said, "What kind of moral position is it to say that the failed aggressor should be given back all the territory from which he launched his attack?" In fact, of no other nation that has been victimized — and victimized repeatedly — by aggressors is such a concession demanded.
Yet Israeli concessions are precisely what the Obama administration is demanding as a precondition of peace. It is ostensibly doing so on the dubious assumption that if only Israel would make further concessions to the Palestinians, peace would be possible. But this assumption flies in the face of 60 years of continuous Arab aggression, including unrelenting terror attacks against Israeli civilians and explicit commitments to wipe out the Jewish state.
The very idea that Israeli settlements (let alone Jewish houses in Jewish neighborhoods) are an obstacle to peace perpetuates the mythical claims of the Arab cause. There are a million Arabs settled in Israel, and they enjoy more rights as Israeli citizens than do the Arab citizens of any Arab Muslim state. So why are the settlements of a few hundred thousand Jews on the West Bank a problem? The only possible answer is Jew hatred, the desire to make the West Bank Judenrein, and ultimately the 60-year Arab campaign to push the Jews into the sea.
The Obama administration's pressure on Israel to give up its settlements and to concede that its capital is disputed terrain feeds the inherent racism of the Arab cause and undermines Israel's ability to resist the genocidal campaign against it. Such pressure cannot promote peace negotiations when the other party is openly dedicated to Israel's destruction and has already shown that it will reject even the most generous offers of peace.
Directly following the Obama administration's attacks on Israel's building project in Jerusalem, the Palestinians invoked Israeli intransigence as a pretext for pulling out of the indirect peace talks that had been taking place. Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas went on record as refusing to enter into direct talks with Israel unless it instituted an immediate construction freeze in its own capital city. Palestinians had previously participated in talks without that condition, but, as one observer noted, "How could the Palestinian position be softer on Israel than the American position? Of course the Palestinians would have to hold Israel to the newly raised standards of the Obama administration." In this way did the Obama administration further the efforts of the Arabs to dismantle the Jewish state.
Observers of this ominous development warned that by attacking Israel over settlements the administration was encouraging a violent buildup that could eventually erupt into a third Intifada. A Hebrew-speaking Arab protester interviewed on Israeli radio called for armed resistance against Israel's "assault on Jerusalem," declaring that the time had come for a new Intifada. The call was taken up by Hamas, which declared a "day of rage" to lash out against Israel. Arab rioters protested in the streets, hurled stones at buses, cars, and police, and clashed with Israeli security forces. On Israel's Highway 443, connecting Jerusalem with the city of Modi'in, Israeli Arabs firebombed passing motorists, wounding a father and his nine-month-old infant. Arab parliamentarians in the Israeli Knesset further fueled the violence. Echoing the Obama administration, one of them said, "Anyone who builds settlements in Jerusalem is digging a grave for peace."
President Obama's overtures to America's enemies have not made the world a safer place.
Even as the new Obama policies were igniting tinderboxes in the Palestinian territories, their most dangerous effects were being felt in Iran. From the beginning of his presidency, Obama had made "reaching out" to the Iranian police state a major part of his approach to the Middle East. In March 2009, he addressed a special Persian New Year message to the Iranian people and the leaders of what he called the "Islamic Republic of Iran," itself an ingratiating reference that served to legitimize the totalitarian rule imposed on the country by the 1979 overthrow of the shah. Doubly shameful were Obama's direct appeals to the mullahs, whom he urged to move the "Islamic Republic of Iran to take its rightful place in the community of nations." At the time, Iran's rulers were engaging in surrogate wars against the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan, supplying al-Qaeda and the Taliban with IEDs, which were the principal cause of the American deaths there. The contrast between Obama's appeasement of this enemy and his aggressive displeasure toward a democratic ally could not have been more striking. It sent a dangerous message to the many other dictatorships and hostile forces in the Middle East.
Obama's apologists insist that his message was no different from those that President Bush had previously delivered on the Persian New Year. But an actual reading of Bush's messages reveals the absurdity of the comparison. Unlike Obama, Bush addressed his words directly to the Iranian people, not to the oppressive Iranian regime, which he condemned for pursuing nuclear weapons and depriving its citizens of the right to "live in a free society." The word freedom appeared three times in one of Bush's messages. It did not appear once in Obama's. Confronting Iran's defiance of the world community, its determination to build nuclear weapons, and its brutal suppression of its own people would have interfered with the overtures Obama was making toward a criminal regime.
In May 2009, Obama sent a personal letter to Iran's "supreme leader," the Ayatollah Khamenei, again disregarding his oppressed subjects. The president's letter appealed for better "co-operation in regional and bilateral relations." Khamenei ignored the letter. Then, in mid-June, he mentioned it scornfully in a sermon in which he inveighed against alleged American interference in Iran's rigged elections that month.
David Horowitz is the founder of the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
Jacob Laksin is managing editor of Frontpage Magazine. He is co-author, with Horowitz, of One-Party Classroom: How Radical Professors at America's Top Colleges Indoctrinate Students and Undermine Our Democracy
Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
No comments:
Post a Comment