Obama is more dangerous than this Arab woman because he believes in his pronouncements and misguided thinking.(See 1 and 6 below)
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All you need to know about government bureaucracy - - -
** Pythagorean theorem: .............................................24 words.
** Lord's prayer:............................................................ 66 words.
** Archimedes' Principle: ............................................. 67 words.
** Ten Commandments: ..............................................179 words.
** Gettysburg address: ................................................286 words.
** Declaration of Independence : ...........................1,300 words.
** US Constitution with 27 Amendments : ............7,818 words.
** US Government regulations on sale of cabbage: ... 26,911 words.
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Netanyahu may be trying to tell Obama and Iran something.
Meanwhile, Netanyahu told Congress, Abbas must do what Netanyahu has done in telling The Palestinians, Israel will accept a Palestinian State. Now Abbas must do likewise.
Time will tell if the Palestinians are sincere or if they seek to acquire, through indirection, what they have refused to achieve through negotiation. Abbas is betting on European support knowing , full well, the deck is stacked against Israel in the U.N. (See 2 below.)
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A former Representative speaks out about Obama's poor choice of words. (See 3 below.)
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Rev. Hagee is a firebrand when it comes to supporting causes in which he believes. [I support CUFI financially. Most liberal Jews are frightened by Rev. Hagee.] (See 4 below.)
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Obama, is a lousy president but it does not seem to matter. Shelby Steele tries to explain why.
The drum beat from the media and press why Republican candidates are flawed has begun in earnest. Our, so called, objective friends in the media and press are prepared to go to unprecedented lengths to insure Obama is re-elected. Obama and his campaign staff will also go to unprecedented lengths to convince voters not to look at Obama's record but to focus on the messiah's syrupy rhetoric and slick phraseology. Yes, the 'Music Man' is back in town. Actually, he never left.
There are those who want voters to believe the election is over - Obama is a sure thing. Then why all the effort to attack Republicans for fielding a bunch of sure losers?
The task for the Republican candidate, whomever that ultimately becomes, is not an easy one because he/she will have to educate voters to focus not only on Obama's glaring paucity of accomplishments but also on their own solutions to the problems our nation faces - some because of Obama's doing and some that are of the vintage variety caused by neglect, stupidity and lack of political statesmanship.
Obama's incompetency is simply the icing on an already stale and rancid cake. (See 5 below.)
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When it comes to Obama and his attitude towards Israel, Bret Stephens and I seem to be on the same page. (See 6 below.)
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Dick
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1)From: Dr. Arieh Eldad:
I was instrumental in establishing the Israeli National Skin Bank, which is the largest in the world. The National Skin Bank stores skin for every
day needs as well as for war time or mass casualty situations.
This skin bank is hosted at the Hadassah Ein Kerem University hospital in Jerusalemwhere I was the Chairman of plastic surgery. This is how I was asked to supply skin for an Arab woman from Gaza , who was hospitalized in Soroka Hospital in Beersheva, after her family burned her. Usually, such atrocities happen among Arab families when the women are suspected of having an affair.
We supplied all the needed Homografts for her treatment. She was successfully treated by my friend and colleague, Prof. Lior Rosenberg and discharged to return to Gaza . She was invited for regular follow-up visits to the outpatient clinic in Beersheva.
One day she was caught at a border crossing wearing a suicide belt.
She meant to explode herself in the outpatient clinic of the hospital where they saved her life.
It seems that her family promised her that if she did that, they would forgive her.
This is only one example of the war between Jews and Muslims in the Land of Israel .It is not a territorial conflict. This is a civilizational conflict, or rather a war between civilization & barbarism.
Bibi (Netanyahu) gets it, Obama does not.
I have never written before asking to please forward onwards, so that as many as possible can understand radical Islam and what awaits the world if it is not stopped.
Dr Arieh Eldad
Eldad is a professor and head of the plastic surgery and burns unit at the Hadassah Medical Center hospital in Jerusalem. He studied medicine at Tel Aviv University, where he earned his doctorate. He served as the chief medical officer and was the senior commander of the Israeli Defense Forces medical corps for 25 years, and reached a rank of Tat Aluf (Brigadier General). He is renowned worldwide for his treatment of burns and won the Evans Award from the American Burns Treatment Association.
He also lives in Kfar Adumim a settlement on the West Bank.
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2) Netanyahu at US Congress hints at Israeli action against Iran, may leave some settlements out of borders
Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu won a standing ovation from both sides of the packed joint US House meeting in Washington, May 24 when he said: In Judea and Samaria, the Jewish people are not foreign occupiers. This is the land of our forefathers." Nonetheless, he said, "we accept that we will have to give up parts of ancestral Jewish homeland for a genuine peace."
He made it clear that if necessary, Israel would act alone to prevent Iran acquiring a nuclear weapon, while lauding President Barack Obama for applying sanctions against the Islamic Republic.
Netanyahu's welcome by the joint House meeting was exceptionally warm and festive. His 50-minute address was interrupted by 30 standing ovations from both sides of the aisle, especially when he ruled out a return to 1967 borders as indefensible while pledging that in talks with parties truly committed to peace, Israel would make far-reaching compromises for an accord that "does not continue the conflict but ends it."
"But first, Abbas must do what I did: I accepted a Palestinian state; he must accept a Jewish state."
While praising President Obama on some issues, the prime minister made light of their differences in the fourth round of their speech contest since last Thursday and won broad congressional applause for his side of their argument. Despite those differences, Netanyahu has said he is determined to work with the president in the quest for peace talks.
Continuing his perception of peace, Netanyahu said: "Israel will be generous about the size of the Palestinian state but very firm on where the borders are."
He stressed that the final accord must reflect dramatic demographic change since 1967and include within Israel's permanent borders other places of strategic importance. The status of the settlements will be determined in negotiations, he said. He became the first Israeli leader to publicly pledge that some settlements "will end up outside the borders."
In private conversations, Netanyahu has listed West Bank settlements with more than 100,000 inhabitants for potential exclusion outside Israel's final boundaries.
It is absolutely vital that the Palestinian state be fully demilitarized and Israel maintain a long-term military presence on the Jordan River, he said. "In the unstable Middle East, no one can guarantee that the peace partners of today will be around tomorrow."
The Palestinian refugee problem must be resolved outside Israel's borders. "They will have the right to immigrate to a viable, prosperous Palestinian state which I support."
On Jerusalem, the prime minister said: The only time in history when all three faiths have enjoyed unfettered access to their holy places and freedom of worship was when Jerusalem fell under Israel sovereignty.. The city will therefore remain the undivided capital of Israel. Solutions will be found for Palestinian difficulties with creativity and good will.
Netanyahu won loud cheers when he said Israel will not negotiate with Hamas, "the Palestinian version of al Qaeda," and called on Mahmoud Abbas to tear up his pact with the group committed to kill Jews everywhere.
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3) ARTUR DAVIS ON OBAMA: FRIEND CHOOSES WRONG WORDS :By Artur Davis
Words matter in politics to the point that they often have equal weight with ideas. That is why Republicans religiously describe the 2010 healthcare reform as "Obamacare." It is why much of the Latino community cringes at the term "illegal aliens" and why Newt Gingrich almost self-immolated his campaign when he described a Republican Medicare proposal as "right wing social engineering."It should be no surprise then, that President Obama's recent endorsement of an Israeli-Palestinian border drawn along the "1967 lines" has proved so contentious. It is possible to blunt the literal value of the words with diplomatic minutiae: the White House was swift to italicize the portion of Obama's speech that referred to additional "swaps" of land on both sides of the 1967 lines as necessary additional elements of a permanent accord. But the reference to "1967 lines" is provocative ground both substantively -- it explicitly reverses the official position of the last several Administrations -- and emotionally.
1967 is a place in Israel's emotional spectrum. It was arguably the last moment that the battleground of the Middle East was a morally equivalent zone in American domestic politics. American sympathies were divided, with a considerable portion of elite and mainstream opinion aligned with at least the anti-communist wing of the Arab world. 1967 and before was also a perilously vulnerable point in the Israeli timeline, when it was conceivable that a flood of Arab armies might actually be capable of extinguishing the Jewish state.
Therefore, in the lexicon of Prime Minister Netanyahu and numerous other American and Israeli Jews, the 1967 borders are tantamount to a threatened, beleaguered Israel that lived in a state of perpetual military alert.
OBAMA'S WORDS
I think there is no doubt Barack Obama is a friend of Israel and that any narrative of the last two years will bear that out. But there are two disconcerting reasons why Obama's striking choice of words and the symbolism around it will backfire and worsen the tense undercurrents in the Middle East.
The first is that the Palestinian world may construe it as a weakening of the American-Israeli alliance. It is no secret that the Palestinian strategy for four decades has been to offset its strategic impotence by undermining Israel's prestige along moral lines. Recasting the Jewish presence in the West Bank and Gaza as an "occupation" is a major tool in that campaign.
To certain elements in the Palestinian universe, a reference to the 1967 borders is a repudiation of the principle that growing Israel is a defensive, security based act and not colonialism.
Second, a retreat to the 1967 lines is a unilateral concession and contains all the risks that one-way concessions always produce. Palestinian President Abbas has all but renounced negotiations and is pursuing the divisive course of winning unilateral statehood from the United Nations, and in so doing will provoke an American veto that foes of Arab moderation will exploit.
Abbas' gambit should be denounced as the equivalent of pouring kerosene on a combustible mix; instead, to Abbas, Obama's rhetorical distancing from past American policies may seem like a reward for his hardening line.
PERPLEXITY OF THE CONFLICT
Obama is right to recognize that the perplexity of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict demands fresh thinking. But the new ideas should be rooted in reversing the peculiarities that make the region so tragic.
For example, the Middle East is the one corner of the globe where radicalism is both authoritarian and anti-modern. The region is one of the few places on earth where "underdogs" even the score by strapping bombs onto backpacks in shopping malls. It is also the rare ground where democracy is still a dangerous gamble that might empower zealots who gut democratic values.
American foreign policy should be aimed at destroying the vitality of those pathologies. They have to be unsettled before Palestinian sovereignty is viable and that will require a de-legitimization effort against Arab and Palestinian hate and intransigence as aggressive as the one Israel's detractors have waged against the Jewish state.
Hence, the power of words again, and the power of words to convey sympathy. Sympathy is one of the most powerful, elemental forces in the Middle East: it must be deployed judiciously, as an instrument to reward responsibility, and should be withheld until the ground has moved on the other side.
Former US Rep. Artur Davis, a Democrat who represented Alabama's 7th congressional district, is now an attorney in Washington, DC. Davis, an Update reader, sent the below to Update in response to President Obama's two recent speeches on the Middle East. During his tenure in Congress, Davis was considered a great friend of Israel.
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4)FROM THE DESK OF PASTOR JOHN HAGEE
John Hagee Ministries
Weekly Update
May 17, 2011
Greetings to all of our Salt Covenant Partners across the nation and around the world.
If you haven't already heard, you will soon hear on the national media about the radical protesters that invaded Cornerstone Church Sunday protesting the right of Israel to exist. I want my friends and partners to have "all the truth and nothing but the truth."
The facts are as follows:
Sunday morning, May 15, 2011, at Cornerstone Church in San Antonio a day was set aside to express our appreciation for the State of Israel and the Jewish people. Hundreds of churches across America and around the world joined us as we stood in solidarity with Israel in this time of crisis.
What I didn't know was that eleven anti-Israel protesters came to our 11:00 am worship service pretending to be worshippers. They sat in different sections of the church; some in the balcony and the majority on the main floor. As it turned out, none of them were Palestinians; they were all local radical activists.
As I stood to deliver the sermon, one female "Palestinian protester" stood at the edge of the balcony and began throwing anti-Israel propaganda leaflets on to the main floor of the sanctuary. She was not screaming; she was throwing leaflets by the handful on the heads of the people below.
The propaganda leaflets said, "We stand in solidarity with Palestinians and demand an end to U.S. support for Israeli occupation, apartheid, and violations of the human rights of Palestinians. We stand in solidarity with the Third Intifada demanding the right of return to occupied territories." One side of the propaganda leaflet has the picture of a mother burying her child under the caption "Your tithes are responsible for this!" The leaflet claimed Israel was responsible for the deaths of 1,500 children since the year 2000.
Cornerstone Church has an outstanding security team consisting of highly trained and professional police officers. On this particular Sunday they were simply spectacular. They quickly located and escorted out the leaflet protester.
Five minutes later, a second protester stood and started screaming as loudly as she could, "Free Palestine! Israel is apartheid. Israel has no right to the land." She was quickly escorted out by security as the congregation cheered and applauded their action and her exodus.
Five minutes after that, a third protester stood and started screaming fanatical propaganda phrases against Israel that are used all over the world to attack Israel and the Jewish people. I now knew we had a major and highly organized protest on our hands whose objective was to shut the service down to prevent this nationally televised tribute to Israel. At this point, I told my congregation, "The objective of these protesters is to shut down this tribute to Israel. I'm going to finish this sermon if it takes until 6:00 pm tonight." The congregation cheered like it was the Super Bowl. These protesters did more to unite our congregation in one hour than a dozen preachers have done in the past few years.
Protester after protester every five minutes stood, screamed slogans, and was escorted out by security. We finished our service in one accord and with total joy.
The protesters were taken to the chapel where they were photographed, required to give their identifications, and charged with criminal trespass by our officers. If they return to church property they will be sent to jail. Some were sent to jail immediately because of outstanding warrants for their arrest. One-third of the staff of a local non-profit organization, the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center, participated in this anti-Israel church invasion.
In reviewing the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center Facebook page it appears that at least five more of the eleven protesters participated in past protests publicized by Esperanza. Esperanza Peace and Justice Center receives tax funding from the city of San Antonio and the state of Texas.
Here is why we are going to continue to support the State of Israel and the Jewish people:
1) Israel is not a political issue.Israel is a Bible issue. Truth is not what you think it is, truth is not what I say it is, truth is what the Bible says it is. The reality is that Israel is the only nation created by a sovereign act of God in the Book of Genesis. Israel was not born on May 15, 1948...it was born 3,500 years ago when Almighty God made an eternal covenant between Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and their descendants (see Genesis 13:14-15 and Genesis 17:7-8).
2) Those who believe the Bible are commanded in Psalms 122:6 to "Pray for the peace of Jerusalem; may they prosper who love you. Peace be within your walls, prosperity within your palaces."
3) God has promised in Genesis 12:1-4 to bless every person and nation who blesses Israel and to curse every person and nation that curses Israel. The effectiveness of this divine mandate is seen in the lives of two Pharaohs. The Pharaoh that blessed Joseph and the Jewish people avoided starvation and knew unlimited prosperity; the Pharaoh that "knew not Joseph" and who drowned Jewish male children in the Nile River was himself turned to fish food in the Red Sea with his army. Exactly what you do to the Jewish people, God will do to you.
4) In Luke 7 the blessing of healing came to the house of a Roman centurion (a Gentile) with a sick servant. Why? Jesus Christ, a Jewish Rabbi, entered the Roman centurion's house and prayed for his sick servant because "he built a synagogue" in the Land of Israel (see Luke 7:1-5).
5) St. Paul has commanded all Christians in Romans 15:27, "For if the Gentiles have benefitted from their spiritual things (the Jewish people) it is the duty of the Gentiles to minister to them in material things." What spiritual blessings have the Jewish people given to us? They have given us the Word of God, the Patriarchs, the Prophets, the first family of Christianity (Mary, Joseph, Jesus, and the 12 Disciples) and the Apostle Paul. Take away the Jewish contribution to Christianity and there would be no Christianity.
6) We support Israel because Jesus Christ our Lord said, "I say to you, 'Inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these My brethren, you did it to Me.'" (Matthew 25:40). The phrase "My brethren"
refers to the Jewish people. Jesus never called the Gentiles His brethren until the cross. Before the cross we were, as St. Paul stated, "outside the covenants of Israel, without God and without hope and of all men most miserable."
7) We support Israel because Obadiah 1:15 and Joel 3:2 make it very clear that any nation (including America) that tries to divide the Land of Israel (including Jerusalem) will indeed experience the
judgment of God. Simply stated, the day America turns its back on Israel will be the day God will turn His back on America.
8) We support Israel because Israel has the right to exist! We call on the President and Congress to demand that Hamas and the Palestinians recognize Israel's right to exist or to cut off all foreign aid immediately. Israel has the right to defined and defensible borders. Israel has the right to defend itself from any nation or group of people that attack them.
To all Bible believers, let us UNITE to stand up and speak up for the State of Israel. God is watching!
Sincerely,
Pastor John Hagee
Cornerstone Church
San Antonio, Texas
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5) Obama's Unspoken Re-Election Edge
This presidency flatters America to a degree that no white Republican can hope to match
By SHELBY STEELE
Many of the Republican presidential hopefuls should be able to beat President Obama in 2012. This president has a track record now and, thus, many vulnerabilities. If he is not our "worst president," as Donald Trump would have it, his sweeping domestic initiatives—especially his stimulus package and health-care reform—were so jerry-built and high-handed that they generated a virtual revolution in America's normally subdued middle class.
The president's success in having Osama bin Laden killed is an exception to a pattern of excruciatingly humble and hesitant leadership abroad. Mr. Obama has been deeply ambivalent about the application of American power, as if a shameful "neocolonialism" attends every U.S. action in the world. In Libya he seems actually to want American power to diminish altogether.
This formula of shrinking American power abroad while expanding government power at home confuses and disappoints many Americans. Before bin Laden, 69% of Americans believed the country was on the wrong track, according to an Ipsos survey. A recent Zogby poll found that only 38% of respondents believed Mr. Obama deserved a second term, while 55% said they wanted someone new.
And yet Republicans everywhere ask, "Who do we have to beat him?" In head-to-head matchups, Mr. Obama beats all of the Republican hopefuls in most polls.
The problem Mr. Obama poses for Republicans is that there has always been a disconnect between his actual performance and his appeal. If Hurricane Katrina irretrievably stained George W. Bush, the BP oil spill left no lasting mark on this president. Mr. Obama's utter confusion in the face of the "Arab spring" has nudged his job-approval numbers down, but not his likability numbers, which Gallup has at a respectable 47.6%. In the mainstream media there has been a willingness to forgive this president his mistakes, to see him as an innocent in an impossible world. Why?
There have really always been two Barack Obamas: the mortal man and the cultural icon. If the actual man is distinctly ordinary, even a little flat and humorless, the cultural icon is quite extraordinary. The problem for Republicans is that they must run against both the man and the myth. In 2008, few knew the man and Republicans were walloped by the myth. Today the man is much clearer, and yet the myth remains compelling.
What gives Mr. Obama a cultural charisma that most Republicans cannot have? First, he represents a truly inspiring American exceptionalism: He is the first black in the entire history of Western civilization to lead a Western nation—and the most powerful nation in the world at that. And so not only is he the most powerful black man in recorded history, but he reached this apex only through the good offices of the great American democracy.
Thus his presidency flatters America to a degree that no white Republican can hope to compete with. He literally validates the American democratic experiment, if not the broader Enlightenment that gave birth to it.
He is also an extraordinary personification of the American Dream: Even someone from a race associated with slavery can rise to the presidency. Whatever disenchantment may surround the man, there is a distinct national pride in having elected him.
All of this adds up to a powerful racial impressionism that works against today's field of Republican candidates. This is the impressionism that framed Sen. John McCain in 2008 as a political and cultural redundancy—yet another older white male presuming to lead the nation.
The point is that anyone who runs against Mr. Obama will be seen through the filter of this racial impressionism, in which white skin is redundant and dark skin is fresh and exceptional. This is the new cultural charisma that the president has introduced into American politics.
Today this charisma is not as strong for Mr. Obama. The mere man and the actual president has not lived up to his billing as a historical breakthrough. Still, the Republican field is framed and—as the polls show—diminished by his mere presence in office, which makes America the most socially evolved nation in the world. Moreover, the mainstream media coddle Mr. Obama—the man—out of its identification with his exceptionalism.
Conversely, the media hold the president's exceptionalism against Republicans. Here is Barack Obama, evidence of a new and progressive America. Here are the Republicans, a cast of largely white males, looking peculiarly unevolved. Add to this the Republicans' quite laudable focus on deficit reduction and spending cuts, and they can be made to look like a gaggle of scolding accountants.
How can the GOP combat the president's cultural charisma? It will have to make vivid the yawning gulf between Obama the flattering icon and Obama the confused and often overwhelmed president. Applaud the exceptionalism he represents, but deny him the right to ride on it as a kind of affirmative action.
A president who is both Democratic and black effectively gives the infamous race card to the entire left: Attack our president and you are a racist. To thwart this, Republicans will have to break through the barrier of political correctness.
Mr. McCain let himself be intimidated by Obama's cultural charisma, threatening to fire any staff member who even used the candidate's middle name. Donald Trump shot to the head of the Republican line by focusing on Mr. Obama as a president, calling him our "worst" president. I carry no brief for Mr. Trump, but his sudden success makes a point: Another kind of charisma redounds to those willing to challenge political correctness—those unwilling to be in thrall to the president's cultural charisma.
Lastly, there must be a Republican message of social exceptionalism. America has more social mobility than any heterogeneous society in history. Isn't there a great Republican opportunity to be had in urging minorities to at last move out of their long era of protest—in which militancy toward the very society they struggled to join was the way ahead? Aren't Republicans uniquely positioned to offer minorities a liberation from both dependency and militancy?
In other words, isn't there a fresh new social idealism implicit in conservative principles? Why not articulate it and fight with it in the political arena? Such a message would show our president as unevolved in his social thinking—oh so 1965. The theme: Barack Obama believes in government; we believe in you.
Mr. Steele is a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Among his books is "White Guilt" (Harper/Collins, 2007).
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6)An Anti-Israel President The president's peace proposal is a formula for war.
By BRET STEPHENS
Say what you will about President Obama's approach to Israel—or of his relationship with American Jews—he sure has mastered the concept of chutzpah.
On Thursday at the State Department, the president gave his big speech on the Middle East, in which he invoked the claims of friendship to tell Israelis "the truth," which to his mind was that "the status quo is unsustainable, and Israel too must act boldly to advance a lasting peace." On Friday in the Oval Office, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu offered his version of the truth, which was that the 1967 border proposed by Mr. Obama as a basis for negotiating the outlines of a Palestinian state was a nonstarter.
Administration reaction to this reciprocal act of friendly truth-telling? "That was Bibi over the top," the New York Times quoted one senior U.S. official, using the prime minister's nickname. "That's not how you address the president of the United States."
Maybe so. Then again, it isn't often that this or any other U.S. president welcomes a foreign leader by sandbagging him with an adversarial policy speech a day before the visit. Remember when the Dalai Lama visited Mr. Obama last year? As a courtesy to Beijing, the president made sure to have the Tibetan spiritual leader exit by the door where the White House trash was piled up. And that was 11 months before Hu Jintao's state visit to the U.S.
When this president wants to make a show of his exquisite diplomatic sensitivity—burgers with Medvedev, bows to Abdullah, New Year's greetings to the mullahs—he knows how. And when he wants to show his contempt, he knows how, too.
The contempt was again on display Sunday, when Mr. Obama spoke to the Aipac policy conference in Washington. The speech was stocked with the perennial bromides about U.S.-Israeli friendship, which brought an anxious crowd to its feet a few times. As for the rest, it was a thin tissue of falsehoods, rhetorical legerdemain, telling omissions and self-contradictions. Let's count the ways.
For starters, it would be nice if the president could come clean about whether his line about the 1967 line—"mutually agreed swaps" and all—was pathbreaking and controversial, or no big deal. On Sunday, Mr. Obama congratulated himself for choosing the hard road to Mideast peace as he prepares for re-election, only to offer a few minutes later that "there was nothing particularly original in my proposal."
Yet assuming Mr. Obama knows what he's talking about, he knows that's untrue: No U.S. president has explicitly endorsed the '67 lines as the basis for negotiating a final border, which is why the University of Michigan's Juan Cole, not exactly a shill for the Israel lobby, called it "a major turning point."
Mr. Obama would also know that in 2009 Hillary Clinton had described this formula as "the Palestinian goal." Now it's Mr. Obama's goal as well, even as he insists that "no peace can be imposed."
Then there was Mr. Obama's use of his favorite professorial trope: "Let me repeat what I actually said." What followed was a rehearsal of what he supposedly said on Thursday.
But Mr. Obama's problem isn't, as he supposes, that people aren't paying close enough attention to him. On the contrary, they've noticed that on Thursday Mr. Obama called for Israel to make territorial concessions to some approximation of the '67 lines before an agreement is reached on the existential issues of refugees and Jerusalem. "Moving forward now on the basis of territory and security," he said, "provides a foundation to resolve these two issues in a way that is just and fair, and that respects the rights and aspirations of Israelis and Palestinians."
Mr. Obama neglected to mention these points on Sunday, hence the telling omission. But the essence of his proposal is that Israel should cede territory, put itself into a weaker position, and then hope for the best. This doesn't even amount to a land-for-peace formula.
That's not all. Mr. Obama got some applause Sunday by calling for a "non-militarized" Palestinian state. But how does that square with his comment, presumably applicable to a future Palestine, that "every state has a right to self-defense"? Mr. Obama was also cheered for his references to Israel as a "Jewish state." But why then obfuscate on the question of Palestinian refugees, whose political purpose over 63 years has been to destroy Israel as a Jewish state?
And then there was that line that "we will hold the Palestinians accountable for their actions and their rhetoric." Applause! But can Mr. Obama offer a single example of having done that as president, except perhaps at the level of a State Department press release?
What, then, would a pro-Israel president do? He would tell Palestinians that there is no right of return. He would make the reform of the Arab mindset toward Israel the centerpiece of his peace efforts. He would outline hard and specific consequences should Hamas join the government.
Such a vision could lay the groundwork for peace. What Mr. Obama offered is a formula for war, one that he will pursue in a second term. Assuming, of course, that he gets one.
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