Personality no match for death threats

Obama learned today that he is not the president of Israel, and that his empty rhetoric is not the most important thing in the world. When faced with an existential threat that The One refuses to fully acknowledge, Israel chooses life.

President Obama yesterday embarked on his most daunting diplomatic challenge yet by telling Israel to take “difficult steps” towards peace, allow a Palestinian state and halt settlement expansion on occupied land.

His talks with Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s hardline Prime Minister, marked the start of an intensive focus on the Middle East. Mr Obama hopes to re-start a peace process that has stalled under a succession of US presidents.

After more than two hours of discussions at the White House Mr Obama said that it was in the interests of every country, including the US, to “achieve a two-state solution in which Israelis and Palestinians are living side by side in peace and security”.

He added: “I suggested to the Prime Minister that he has an historic opportunity to get a serious movement on this issue during his tenure. That means that all the parties involved have to take seriously obligations that they have previously agreed to.”

Such obligations, he said, had been “outlined in the road map” agreed with the US in 2003 and meant that building work by Jewish settlers on Palestinian land must cease. “We have to make progress on settlements,” Mr Obama said. “Settlements have to be stopped.”

Mr Netanyahu has so far refused to endorse full Palestinian statehood. He has suggested that settlements needed to be allowed to grow naturally, insisting that the priority should be to deal with the “existential threat” to Israel posed by a nuclear Iran.

At the White House he again pointedly sidestepped the issue of Palestinian sovereignty, indicating that he favoured a more limited form of self-government for Palestinians. While promising to resume peace talks immediately he said that any deal depended on the acceptance across the Arab world of Israel’s right to exist.

Obama studied the Quran as a child in Indonesia. He surely knows that Allah, through the perverted prophet Mohammed, commands his followers to kill Jews where ever they may find them. He must know that there is zero possibility that a two-state solution will heal the wounds in the Middle East. Again, I do not believe that this stand is adopted out of ignorance, but for some alternate purpose. There are those who believe Obama is secretly a Muslim. While that certainly would be an excellent reason for his conduct toward Israel, I do not accept that explanation. Given his policies in the United States to date, I think it much more likely that he simply hates Israel because, like us, it is a free, democratic and productive nation. From all indications, that is the one thing that Obama simply cannot allow to stand.