Here is Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu today, speaking to AIPAC on a subject that should be top priority for the Community Organizer in Chief:
Time and again the Israeli army was forced to repel attacks of much larger enemies determined to destroy us. Recognizing that we could not be defeated in battle, Egypt and Jordan, embraced the path of peace. Yet there are those who continue the assault against the Jewish state and who openly call for our destruction. They seek to achieve this goal through terrorism, missile attacks and most recently by seeking to develop atomic weapons.
The ingathering of the Jewish people to Israel has not deterred these fanatics. In fact, it has only whetted their appetite. Iran’s rulers say Israel is a one bomb country.” The head of Hezbollah says: ”If all the Jews gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide.”
My friends,
These are unpleasant facts, but they are the facts. The greatest threat to any living organism or nation is not to recognize danger in time. Seventy-five years ago, the leading powers in the world put their heads in the sand. Untold millions died in the war that followed. Ultimately, two of history’s greatest leaders helped turn the tide. Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Winston Churchill helped save the world. But they were too late to save six million of my own people.
The future of the Jewish state can never depend on the goodwill of even the greatest of men. Israel must always reserve the right to defend itself.
Today, an unprecedented threat to humanity looms large. A radical Iranian regime armed with nuclear weapons could bring an end to the era of nuclear peace the world has enjoyed for the last 65 years. Such a regime could provide nuclear weapons to terrorists and might even be tempted to use them itself. Our world would never be the same. Iran’s brazen bid to develop nuclear weapons is first and foremost a threat to Israel, but it is also a grave threat to the region and to the world. Israel expects the international community to act swiftly and decisively to thwart this danger. But we will always reserve the right to defend ourselves.
We must also defend ourselves against the lies and vilifications. Throughout history, the slanders against the Jewish people always preceded the physical assaults against them and were used to justify them. The Jews were called the well-poisoners of mankind, the fomenters of instability, the source of all evil under the sun. Like the physical assaults, these libelous attacks against the Jewish people did not end with the creation of Israel. For a time after World War Two, overt anti-Semitism was held in check by the shame and shock of the Holocaust. But only for a time.
In recent decades the hatred of the Jews has reemerged with increasing force, but with an insidious twist. It is not merely directed at the Jewish people but increasingly at the Jewish state. In its most pernicious form, it argues that if only Israel did not exist, many of the world’s problems would go away....
The connection between the Jewish people and the Land of Israel cannot be denied. The connection between the Jewish people and Jerusalem cannot be denied.
The Jewish people were building Jerusalem 3,000 year ago and the Jewish people are building Jerusalem today. Jerusalem is not a settlement. It is our capital....
For decades, Israel served as a bulwark against Soviet expansionism. Today it is helping America stem the tide of militant Islam. Israel shares with America everything we know about fighting a new kind of enemy. We share intelligence and we cooperate in countless other ways that I am not at liberty to divulge. This cooperation saves American lives.
Our soldiers and your soldiers fight against fanatic enemies that loathe our common values. In the eyes of these fanatics, we are you and you are us.To them, the only difference is that you are big and we are small, you are the Great Satan and we are the Little Satan. This fanaticism’s hatred of Western civilization predates Israels establishment by over one thousand years. Militant Islam does not hate the West because of Israel. It hates Israel because of the West, because it sees Israel as an outpost of freedom that prevents them from overrunning the Middle East. When Israel stands against its enemies, it stands against America’s enemies. [read, or listen to it all at the link, of course]
It is well to remember what Winston Churchill once famously observed:
An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last.
Remember Neville Chamberlain? The crocodiles ate him. A new generation of crocodiles are circling in the sewers of the world today looking for the Chamberlain of the 21st century.
I believe they have found Chamberlain's equivalent in Obama.
Obama in April, 2009, in Prague:
So let me be clear: Iran's nuclear and ballistic missile activity poses a real threat, not just to the United States, but to Iran's neighbors and our allies. The Czech Republic and Poland have been courageous in agreeing to host a defense against these missiles. As long as the threat from Iran persists, we will go forward with a missile defense system that is cost-effective and proven. (Applause.) If the Iranian threat is eliminated, we will have a stronger basis for security, and the driving force for missile defense construction in Europe will be removed. (Applause.)
Obama, almost one year later:
President Barack Obama renewed his administration's offer of dialogue and diplomacy with Tehran on Saturday, a year after his offer of a new beginning with Iran failed to achieve concrete results.
Obama, who addressed Iranians in a new videotaped appeal to mark the observance of Nowruz -- a festival celebrating the arrival of spring -- has pledged to pursue aggressive sanctions to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon.
"We are working with the international community to hold the Iranian government accountable because they refuse to live up to their international obligations," Obama said in the address released by the White House.
One year later and he's still nattering on about "aggressive sanctions"?? I suspect that after Iran responds to this in a totally predictable manner, his next to issue a statement of extreme bewilderment over their intransigent attitude toward peace and how hurt his feelings are about it.
Ask yourself why the U.S. is now systematically, and with great haste, selling out our allies and making nice with tyrants all around the world. Our foreign policy is now selfless, unilateral appeasement.
The crocodiles are circling, and the only free country willing to oppose them has basically been abandoned by the White House. While Obama meets behind closed doors without as much as a photo-op with the Prime Minister of our closest ally in the Middle East; remember (as Charles Krauthammer pointed out on Special Report today) that this is the same President who bowed to the Saudi King and who shook hands in public and posed for pics with Hugo Chavez.
Pretty much says it all, doesn't it?
UPDATE: Victor Davis Hanson this morning:
So we are watching unfold a sort of Chicago-style Realpolitik, flavored with the traditional academic leftist disdain for the Jewish state. The subsequent result is not so much a cut-off of U.S. aid as a subtle shift in perception abroad: Israel’s multiple enemies now are almost giddy in sensing that America is not all that into protecting the Jewish state, intellectually or morally. And given the nature of the UN, given the power of oil, given endemic anti-Semitism, given the collapse of classical liberal thought in Europe (e.g., Britain was far more deferential to Libya in repatriating a supposedly “terminally ill” mass murderer to Tripoli than it is currently with Israel), and given the realpolitik amorality of Russian and Chinese foreign policy, the world as a whole can now far more easily step up its own natural pressure on Israel, at just the moment when it increasingly has no margin of error with a soon-to-be nuclear Iran.
Once the U.S. blinks, the floodgates open — that is the real lesson from the incremental, but unmistakable shift in U.S.-Israeli relations. Like radical shifts in thinking about health care, energy use, and amnesty, so too abroad Obama realizes that the difficult process of "change," in this case of becoming a neutral in the Middle East and deeming Israel's democracy unexceptional in the region, will require all sorts of dissimulation, denials, clarifications, and acrimony. But ultimately, the end of "solving" the Middle East crisis will be seen as well worth the now unpleasant and often tawdry means of doing it.
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