A Tale of Two Columns: the Israeli question & Obama's Speech

New York Times & National Review ^ | May 20/21, 2001 | Roger Cohen & Andrew C. McCarthy

[jobim]

Roger Cohen in the NYT:

Obama, in a first for an American president, has now said the border between Israel and Palestine should be “based on the 1967 lines.” Yes, it should. Netanyahu still talks of “Judea and Samaria,” a lexicon that, true to his Likud party’s platform, does not acknowledge those lines but sees one land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean.....

What is “indefensible” over time for Israel is colonizing another people. That process has continued with settlements expanding in defiance of Obama’s urging.

Andrew C. McCarthy in the National review:

As the president utters his paeans to nonviolence, Egyptians and Iraqis continue slaughtering their religious minorities, and Bashar Assad, the “reformer,” murders his Syrian subjects in the street with the help of his friends at Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed terrorist organization whose day job is running the Lebanese government....

The democracy fetish that gave Hezbollah and Hamas thugs the patina of political legitimacy is about to place Egypt under the thumb of the Muslim Brotherhood, which is itching to deep-six the treaty that has kept peace with Israel for 30 years....

The Jewish claim on Judea and Samaria... was intentionally obfuscated by Obama’s earlier suggestion in Cairo that Israel’s creation was an ill-conceived payback for the Holocaust, as it is by the convention of referring to Judea and Samaria as “the West Bank,” the name Jordan gave them when it seized and occupied them at the conclusion of Israel’s war of independence....

This president’s demands are made only on Israel; Hamas gets hopey-changey cajoling.

[jobim]

We can accept the interpretation of Cohen, or we can accept the intrepretation of McCarthy. In my opinion, McCarthy, as is his custom, is clear, concise, and deadly accurate.

[okie01]

It is as if the gauntlet has been thrown.

The Left wants Israel gone. And, now, at long last, they are owning up to it.

The Obama administration -- and their left-wing backers --is now committed to the destruction of Israel.

It's now a race to November, 2012.

[Pollster1]

McCarthy, as is his custom, is clear, concise, and deadly accurate.

Unfortunately, if Obama gets his way, we will see that McCarthy's implied prediction (reading only the excerpt) was in the literal sense deadly accurate.

[samtheman]

Any Jew who votes for Obama in 2012 is a Criminal of Conscience.

[Norseman]

Yet a lot of Jewish voters WILL vote for Obama in 2012. I just don’t understand this. Is it because they don’t care about Israel? And, if they don’t care about it, do they care so little that they actually want to see the Arab world obliterate it?

I’d appreciate some insights, possibly from a Jewish voter who fully intends to support Obama again in 2012.

[Publius6961]

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