David Singer: "Obama Got it Wrong from the Start & Nothing was Going to Save Him from Failure in the End"

Here's the latest article by Sydney lawyer and international affairs analyst David Singer.  It's entitled "Palestine – Obama's Ignorance Becomes His Nemesis".

Writes David Singer:

President Obama enters his final year as President having given up on trying to resolve the Jewish-Arab conflict – following in the footsteps of so many other American Presidents whose similarly-shared lofty and noble aspirations ended in abject failure.

In Obama's case his inability to fully comprehend Jewish history and the connection of the Jewish people to the land of Israel was the catalyst for his inevitable failure – as tellingly illustrated in his landmark speech in Cairo on 4 June 2009:

"Around the world, the Jewish people were persecuted for centuries, and anti-Semitism in Europe culminated in an unprecedented Holocaust. Tomorrow, I will visit Buchenwald, which was part of a network of camps where Jews were enslaved, tortured, shot and gassed to death by the Third Reich. Six million Jews were killed – more than the entire Jewish population of Israel today. Denying that fact is baseless, ignorant, and hateful. Threatening Israel with destruction – or repeating vile stereotypes about Jews – is deeply wrong, and only serves to evoke in the minds of Israelis this most painful of memories while preventing the peace that the people of this region deserve."

Israel's current Director General of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Dore Gold, has now revealed how Israel's then leadership viewed Obama's above remarks in this frank exchange published in Frontline on 6 January:

"When the president goes to Cairo for the speech, and you heard him speak, what did you think?

Well, everybody that was in my entourage focused on the whole notion that the state of Israel rose as a response to the Holocaust. That was something that was unacceptable.

Why?

Because Israel has an eternity to it that goes far back before the 20th century, the 19th century, and even earlier. All we have to do is know that there was a Jewish majority in Jerusalem already at the time of the American Civil War. All we have to know is that we had a civilization here that was destroyed by the Romans. You can now find the catapult, the Ballista, used to fight the Jewish resistance at the time of the 1st century, 70 A.D. Our history is all over this city and all over the country. Therefore, an explanation that sees us as a bunch of Europeans who are looking for a refuge from the Nazis is a partial and not terribly accurate understanding of the soul of this country.

Does it surprise you that the president of the United States would make that error?'It surprised me that they have a speechwriter who would be allowed to write that kind of document, because I think Sen. Obama was presented with the four dimensions of Israel, but someone decided to take this partial approach in a presidential speech, and it didn’t earn him confidence with the people of Israel. …"

Blaming Obama's ignorance on a speechwriter is being very charitable to President Obama and his administration including the State Department and his equally failed Secretary of State, John Kerry, who all must accept collective responsibility for Obama 's further statement:

"The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements. This construction violates previous agreements and undermines efforts to achieve peace. It is time for these settlements to stop."

Questioning the legitimacy of the right of the Jewish People to live anywhere in their ancient biblical and historical homeland – sanctioned by both the League of Nations and United Nations – was catastrophic.

Question the political wisdom – but not its legitimacy.

Obama got it wrong from the start and nothing was going to save him from failure in the end.

[Photo credit:  americansstandwithisrael.blogspot.com]

Oh, Oh, Obama! "I'm the closest thing to a Jew that has ever sat in this Office"

In The Atlantic recently, an in-depth interview by Jeffrey Goldberg with Barack Obama that begins:

'On Tuesday afternoon, as President Obama was bringing an occasionally contentious but often illuminating hour-long conversation about the Middle East to an end, I brought up a persistent worry. “A majority of American Jews want to support the Iran deal,” I said, “but a lot of people are anxiety-ridden about this, as am I.” Like many Jews—and also, by the way, many non-Jews—I believe that it is prudent to keep nuclear weapons out of the hands of anti-Semitic regimes. Obama, who earlier in the discussion had explicitly labeled the supreme leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, an anti-Semite, responded with an argument I had not heard him make before.

“Look, 20 years from now, I’m still going to be around, God willing. If Iran has a nuclear weapon, it’s my name on this,” he said, referring to the apparently almost-finished nuclear agreement between Iran and a group of world powers led by the United States. “I think it’s fair to say that in addition to our profound national-security interests, I have a personal interest in locking this down.”....'

And now, in Foreign Policy magazine, a must-read interview by David Rothkopf with Jeffrey Goldberg, entitled "In Search of the Real Barack Obama." in which Goldberg says, inter alia:

'..... To put it crudely, the basic split on Obama is this: Is he destroying Israel, or is Israel destroying Israel? I go more with the latter than the former at the moment. If you believe the former, you despise him. If you believe the latter, you can’t quite believe that a) Israel’s government is carrying out policies that will eventually lead to the country’s dissolution, or wholesale isolation; and b) that more Israelis don’t understand that an African-American president who speaks feelingly about the moral necessity of Zionism is a friend, not a foe. But we can talk about that later.

On Iran, I was happy to hear him say he owns this process.

It’s on him, and the fact that [Obama] recognizes that he will be blamed, even as a 75-year-old, if Iran gets a bomb, is actually reassuring.

But I also worry that he is unrealistic about aspects of the Iran deal, for a number of reasons — the way they will spend their money, his belief that his negotiators are dealing with rational people — rational in the way that you and I think of rationality — and so on. On Gulf issues, the hardest swallow is that he appeared to be warning Saudi Arabia of the consequences associated with gearing-up its own nuclear program, but he’s attempting to strike a deal with Iran that allows it, in essence, to maintain the infrastructure of a nuclear program. In other words, an ally is being treated more harshly, in this one way, than an adversary. Of course, his answer to this is that Saudi Arabia has America behind it, so it doesn’t need a nuclear program. Still, the optics are strange, and the unhappiness of certain Arab leaders is understandable.....'

 Meanwhile, according to the Daily Mail Obama's former senior adviser Dan Axelrod has revealed that Obama claimed:  "I'm the closest thing to a Jew that has ever sat in this office."

Really?  Despite this?

Anyway,  here's America's former UN ambassador John Bolton :