“The President’s Prophetic Threats to Israel,” as outlined by John Podhoretz of Commentary:
In an extraordinary—and I don’t use the word in a complimentary way—interview with Jeffrey Goldberg of Bloomberg, President Obama follows his secretary of state in warning Israel and its leader that a failure to “make peace” now with the Palestinians will have terrible consequences. Israel is “more isolated internationally,” and will become more so; there will be more Palestinians and Israeli Arabs as time goes on, not fewer, so Israel had better move now; and not to move now is to create the conditions for a “permanent Israeli occupation of the West Bank….there comes a point when you cannot manage this anymore.”
The wild logical contradictions in his remarks expose the degree to which the American approach in the Kerry peace talks is to haunt Israel with the dire nightmare it will face should the talks fail; Palestinian rejectionism plays almost no role in the Obaman calculus here.
The Palestinians, in Obama’s view, do not actually need to make changes; astonishingly, he says, they’re ready for peace. “The Palestinians,” the president says, overlooking every piece of polling data we have about the opinions of the Palestinians, “would still prefer peace. They would still prefer a country of their own that allows them to find a job, send their kids to school, travel overseas, go back and forth to work without feeling as if they are restricted or constrained as a people. And they recognize that Israel is not going anywhere.”
In 2006, when then Secretary of State Condi Rice expressed a similarly cheerful take on the Palestinians to Cal Thomas, then hosting a Fox New program, Thomas asked what Mark Steyn described at the time as “a shrewd followup: ‘Do you think this or do you know this?'”
Given that the geopolitical worldview of both Messrs. Obama and Kerry flow from the fantasyland intersection of academia and radical chic, and that they’re invariably “unexpectedly” surprised when the world doesn’t quite conform to their expectations, that would be a worthwhile question to ask the president or his aides as well, if there were any interviewers who were prepared for the confrontation to follow — especially after the cameras are switched off.
After endorsing his approach twice at election time, the Washington Post rather belatedly noted yesterday that “President Obama’s foreign policy is based on fantasy.” And as they noted, fantasyland doesn’t just apply to how the president views the events in Russia.
Our allies — or at least our allies as of the end of 2008 — should plan accordingly to maximize their chances of survival in what Obama booster Fareed Zakaria of Time-Warner-CNN-HBO would call (approvingly) the post-American World.
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