Abbas laments the failure of Hope & Change

Hot Air ^ | April 25, 2011 | ED MORRISSEY

[RobinMasters]

The promise of Hope and Change has left a lot of Americans disillusioned, but they’re not alone. An angry Mahmoud Abbas tells Newsweek that Barack Obama led the Palestinian Authority president on, and then abandoned him on the issue of Israeli settlements in Jerusalem. In fact, Abbas says, it was Obama’s idea to push for a total ban on settlements in the first place (via Hot Air reader AR):

Abbas is about as affable as politicians come—even hawkish Israelis like Ariel Sharon have said so. But occasionally, he can deliver a shot of scathing criticism, usually followed by a grandfatherly smile. A week earlier, he told me bluntly that Obama had led him on, and then let him down by failing to keep pressure on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for a moratorium on settlement building in the West Bank last year. “It was Obama who suggested a full settlement freeze,” Abbas explained. “I said OK, I accept. We both went up the tree. After that, he came down with a ladder and he removed the ladder and said to me, jump. Three times he did it.” Abbas also criticized the mediation efforts of Obama’s special envoy, George Mitchell, who has shuttled between Israelis and Palestinians for more than two years. “Every visit by Mitchell, we talked to him and gave him some ideas. At the end we discovered that he didn’t convey any of these ideas to the Israelis. What does it mean?”

[lurk]

So Left, Right and Evil are all disappointed with our President.

[SunkenCiv]

Abbas? There's more than one? Eww.

Thank RobinMasters.

[SJackson]

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