Why has Barack Obama been reluctant to congratulate Bibi Netanyahu for his surprising and smashing electoral victory in this week’s Israeli elections, aside from the obvious childish personal enmity?
It couldn’t be more obvious. Obama — never a gracious man — is seeing the bad handwriting on the wall. Israel, like America, has a “silent majority” and they have stood up tall in opposition to so-called liberalism/progressivism and defeatism against Islamic terror. That same “silent majority” is very likely to stand up again in this country in 2016 for similar reasons. They already did in 2014 — and they could go further, unraveling all of Obama’s policies and destroying his legacy.
The astonishing size of the Likud victory — the party was predicted in polls to lose by 3-4 Knesset seats and ended up winning by 5-6 — suggests the “silent majority” phenomenon of people quietly becoming fed up with being force-fed by liberal elites. If you read mainstream media coverage today, you see those same media having quasi-nervous breakdowns. Suddenly they are disenchanted with democracy.
And this all happened despite Obama’s get-out-the-vote henchmen being sent over to Israel — with a yet unclear degree of administration backing — to support the Zionist Union (i. e. Labor Party) opposition to Likud with all their modern electoral techniques that were so successful in 2012. This makes their failure all the more glaring — and disturbing to the administration.
Another loser in all this is Obama’s Iran deal, assuming that would ever happen anyway. It makes the 47 senators who sent an open letter to Khamenei seem more than ever the deliverers of simple truth.
As for all the brouhaha about a Palestinian state — Bibi apparently pledged no Pal state in the final days of the election — this is irrelevant. As of now, and as of the last 25 or so years since the Oslo Accords, the Palestinians have shown no real interest in a two-state solution, other than for propaganda purposes. When discussions get serious, they always run for the proverbial hills. The idea that Obama and Kerry are going to solve this in 20 months of their administration is somewhere south of silly.
This election is good news. Time for the GOP to redouble their efforts for 2016.
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image illustration via shutterstock / Mikael Damkier
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