Due to work obligations I was unable to catch Obama’s regrettable speech today, which is probably a good thing though Steve and I discussed it at length on today’s CRF show.
If you can stomach it, here’s the video of Obama demanding that Israel and Palestine must return to 1967 borders:
Reaction from the Right:
From The Right Scoop: Rush: “The Arab Spring is an offensive against Israel”.
And from The Daily Caller:
“The Arab Spring is an uprising of Middle Eastern nations against Israel and they aided and abetted by President Barack Obama of the United States of America,” Limbaugh declared. “That’s what’s going on and that’s what this speech was all about.”
However, more specifically, Limbaugh explained why Obama’s proposal was wrong by offering an analogy to his proposal that Israel and Palestine reinstate the 1967 border agreement.
“What country in its right mind make a deal with such an enemy?” Limbaugh said. “Would we go back to our 1848 borders? Would we give the French areas of the Louisiana Purchase? Would we do this? What kind of president urges a country to destroy itself and submit its people to potential genocide? And that’s what Obama has just done.”
Barack Obama showed up a half-hour late, and once again used the self-promoted White House occasion to say nothing specific, and nothing new. Even in the most specific part of the speech, regarding the American position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Obama offered nothing new. The entire speech could easily have been delivered by George W. Bush in its commendable but hardly inspirational cheering of democratization, which foundered on Obama’s decision to task Bashar Assad with leading democratic reform in Syria.
The first clue as to the wan nature of the speech was a lack of early, embargoed release of the speech. Usually, major addresses get released to the media so that the transcripts go up at about the same time the speech starts. In this case, whether deliberately or through lack of coordination, the first transcript at National Journal appeared more than halfway through the speech. If that is a minor point, then the reaction of the audience at the State Department was not. Obama paused for applause after defending the mission that killed Osama bin Laden, and got silence. Apart from a few weak rounds of applause, the audience didn’t react at all, not even for Obama’s defense of Israel’s existence near the end.
More reaction from Professor William Jacobson at Legal Insurrection:
Whether the speech really accomplished anything is in doubt. If anything, it will be a negative, not because it ends up that much farther than prior positions, but because it fits with the unacceptable narrative that Israel is the problem. Why doesn’t Jordan, which constitutes most of the British Palestine, give up some land? Why only Israel?
This was a good day for the Palestinians because the President of the United States has sided with their territorial demands without the Palestinians having to give anything in return.
Finally, from Fox News, Netanyahu Rejects Obama Call for Palestinian State Based on 1967 Borders
:
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu swiftly rejected President Obama’s call Thursday for Israel to pull back to the borders that existed before the 1967 Six-Day War, calling those lines militarily “indefensible.”
Obama, in a sweeping address tackling the uprisings in the Middle East and the stalled peace process, stunned Washington and Jerusalem by endorsing Palestinians’ demand for their own state based on the pre-1967 borders. The break with longstanding U.S. policy appeared to immediately aggravate the Israelis, who want the borders of any future Palestinian state determined through negotiations.
In a statement released late Thursday, Netanyahu said such a withdrawal would jeopardize Israel’s security and leave major West Bank settlements outside Israeli borders.
Arab Spring? Just ask the Coptic Christians in Egypt how well that’s working out for them:
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