Quote of the Day: Rick Perry’s fantasy about Obama, Israel
Nate Beeler, The Washington Examiner
Rick Perry continues to make a big new and old media splash with his rhetoric. He is having little trouble getting ink, digital coverage or radio/cable buzztime.
Our Quote of the Day comes from CNN’s John Avlon, who has a must-read column on Perry’s comments on Obama and Israel. Many commentators have noted that Perry delivered this hours before President Barack Obama was to give a ticklish speech at the UN on the Middle East:
Gov. Rick Perry unleashed an onslaught against President Obama’s Israel policy Tuesday in New York, calling it “moral equivalency,” “appeasement,” “naive and arrogant, misguided and dangerous.”
All this sounds very bad, deepening the narrative that Obama is hell-bent on alienating our closest allies, secretly sides with Muslims in the Middle East and has broken with decades of U.S. policy to do so. On cue, a second spin-driven news-cycle appeared: “Will Obama lose the Jewish vote in 2012?”
Meanwhile, back in reality, the Obama administration was standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Israel at the United Nations to stop the Palestinians’ reckless bid to achieve statehood outside the negotiation table. More than 120 U.N. member states are backing the Palestinians, but the U.S. has the power to block such a move in the Security Council, if necessary, and we have never wavered in our commitment to do so. That is what historic allies do for each other.
Of course, “No country can be expected to negotiate with a terrorist organization sworn to its destruction.” That’s what Obama has said repeatedly, and that’s why there is no moral equivalence between the state of Israel and the terrorist-backed political party Hamas or even the PLO-rooted Fatah Party, once led by corrupt charlatan and terrorist-turned-Nobel Peace Prize winner Yasser Arafat.
That’s why U.S. military aid to Israel totals more than $3 billion a year and has gone up under the Obama administration. In turn, Obama has said, like most presidents before him, “The United States has no better friend in the world than Israel.”
The Obama administration’s support for a ‘two-state solution” — determined in mutually agreed-upon negotiations with Israel and conditional on security provisions for Israel, including a non-militarized Palestinian state — is not significantly different from the goal advanced by the Bush and Clinton administrations.
Read the rest of it. I heard Perry’s comments and Mitt Romney’s on XM radio while driving through Pennsylvania today and sighed since it’s another sign of how our politics is often at varience with the facts. But what do facts matter when the whole thrust our our politics now is to try and discredit rather than offer alternative, affirmative solutions.
If Obama got Palestinian officials and Israeli officials to put their arms around each other and sing the old Michael Jackson song “WE ARE THE WORLD” and settle all their differences Republicans would attack him for his choice of song.
3 Responses to “Quote of the Day: Rick Perry’s fantasy about Obama, Israel”
The President defended Israel at the UN today.
Although, to be fair, the President never looked Netanyahu in the eye, or even the face, when he said that it was; “a badge of honor for the President to support Israel”, in this circumstance. Meaning to me, that the President of the United States has reason not to respect Netanyahu. I side with my President and I would say to Netanyahu:
…WE DON’T NEED YOUR STINK’N BADGES!
I could not find anything wrong with Perry’s speech. I am waiting for one of the Republican candidates to say the two state solution is a sham and should be abandoned.
As a fellow Jew, but fairly tame, I wonder what you have in mind to replace the two state solution. From my perspective as an Israeli citizen, it seems that the options are as follows:
1 – Transfer of the Palestinians to some other state.
2 – Transfer portions of the West Bank and Gaza that Israel does not want to keep to Jordan and Egypt even though those states have, and will continue, to refuse.
3 – Apartheid by annexing the West Bank and not giving the Palestinians living there citizenship.
4 – Apartheid by herding the Palestinians into autonomous reservations surrounding their major cities – bantustans while annexing the rest of the territory. This would require Israeli permission for everyone and everything moving between their cities.
5 – A true bi-national state with equal rights and citizenship for all. Demographics would mean we would lose the Jewish character of our homeland.
Which option do you think is right?