YNet reports:
Referring to the US president’s Mideast policy speech, a Netanyahu associate said: “He (Obama) didn’t deliver the goods…Obama apparently does not understand the reality in the Mideast.”
The PM’s aides added that Obama’s historic speech lacked many key points and that his address was “bad for Israel.” Netanyahu himself issued a quick response to the speech earlier, demanding that the president reaffirm previous US pledges that Israel will not be asked to withdraw to the 1967 borders in the framework of a peace deal with the Palestinians.
Obama being detached from reality in the MidEast would be an improvement on what I think is actually the case. I don’t think Obama lacks “understanding” of MidEast realities. He just holds a pro-Palestinian view of them, as is typical of far left academics. Stanley Kurtz reminds us not only of Obama’s radical, pro-Palestinian past, but of a story about Obama’s views that appeared in the LA Times in 2008. Palestinian activists who met candidate Obama sized him up and found him sympathetic to their side of the fight.
. . . Ali Abunimah, a Palestinian rights activist in Chicago who helps run Electronic Intifada, said that he met Obama several times at Palestinian and Arab American community events. At one, a 2000 fundraiser at a private home, Obama called for the U.S. to take an “even-handed” approach toward Israel….
Abunimah, in a Times interview and on his website, said Obama seemed sympathetic to the Palestinian cause but more circumspect as he ran for the U.S. Senate in 2004. At a dinner gathering that year, Abunimah said, Obama greeted him warmly and said privately that he needed to speak cautiously about the Middle East.
Why would Obama need to speak cautiously about the Middle East? And why would he relate this to an activist involved with something called Electronic Intifada?
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