Thursday, May 19, 2011

How To Embarrass Your Allies

If your ally is England, give them back the bust of Churchill, give the Queen an Ipod of your speeches, and give the prime minister 50 DVDs that won't play on English DVD players. This while they give you several historically precious items...considering that Britian abolished the slave trade long before the US did...

Then there's Israel. Tell the world that you want Israel to go bacl to its 1967 borders - without discussing it with them first. You know Israel isn't going to do it (despite what Rush says in the transcript below.) Not if they expect to survive.
President Obama: The United States believes that negotiations should result in two states, with permanent Palestinian borders with Israel, Jordan, and Egypt, and permanent Israeli borders with Palestine. We believe the borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps, so that secure and recognized borders are established for both states. The Palestinian people must have the right to govern themselves, and reach their potential, in a sovereign and contiguous state."

Back to the 1967 borders. So Israel is now surrounded by enemies. I've been there. You really can't grasp this until you go. I mean you can look at it on a map but 'til you see how small Israel is and how surrounded it is, and then the demands that they give up even more, Israel is a country at one point nine miles wide, nine miles is all. Now, these enemies which surround Israel now have major weapons. And so according to President Obama, in a speech, Israel should give up its buffer areas like the Golan Heights, and again, if you've been to the Golan Heights you can see the strategic importance. You can see everything from there, including who's coming at you.

Now, for me, I don't know how you can even think this way. And again, I say this having been there and toured Israel for five days. I don't know how you can think this way when the Palestinians are committed to destroying Israel. And it's not just the Palestinians. Virtually every nation surrounding Israel is committed to its destruction. What country in its right mind would make a deal with such an enemy? 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.

Now, there is some scuttlebutt going on, and it's only fair to mention this. As you know, Benjamin Netanyahu is coming to Washington to meet with President Obama. And the scuttlebutt is that as a bargaining chip, Netanyahu was considering using this offer of going back to the '67 borders with swaps. I don't know if this is true, but the scuttlebutt is that in a certain set of circumstances, if negotiations evolved in a certain way, that this would be something Netanyahu would propose. Well, if that's true, he's lost it because Obama just gave it away. Obama just used it himself, if that was to be a bargaining chip. Now, I have to tell you, I don't understand how that would be a bargaining chip. I don't know yet, I'm gonna have to try to learn this. I don't know why Israel would offer to go back to the '67 borders. But that's the scuttlebutt. The scuttlebutt is that they might be willing to and Netanyahu might be willing to offer such a thing. All right, well, let's accept that, the scuttlebutt's true; he can't offer it any longer because Obama just took it.

Rush added a little bit to that later on in the show:

I did get a note here from someone familiar with the internal political workings of the state of Israel. "Rush, the 1967 borders, as a basis for two states, is not a big deal. The vast majority of Israelis favor it or are at least politically reconciled to that. That's not a big deal. The real news in this speech is that Obama advocates a two-state deal without first settling the claims of the Palestinian refugees from 1948 to a right of return." You're familiar with that term? The right of return means the 1948 refugees demand a return to their homes in pre-1967 Israel. "If that were part of any deal that would of course destroy Israel as a Jewish state, it would be overrun. And it's an extreme demand that nobody in Israel can or ever would accept, and until the Palestinians agree, as they haven't, to relinquish this right, there can't be a deal."

There will not be two states unless the Palestinians give up on that. And they haven't, and they won't, and my old buddy here says if Obama can't say that in public, he's being irresponsible or worse. Now, I'm assuming here that all of this is pap. This whole speech today is designed to be something other than what it came off being. It celebrates the Arab Spring, aligning against Israel, all of this, there's no question about it. But to have a genuine two-state existence, the right of return has to be dealt with, and it hasn't been. It wasn't even mentioned and as such to talk about a two-state solution without mentioning a right of return is irresponsible.

So here you have grandstanding on the part of the president for his own personal political purposes, without regard to the results of anything on the ground in Israel. It's not surprising. It's not surprising Obama would hijack something that everybody thinks is of great, major import; would hijack something that everybody thinks portends major change for the region, when in fact it doesn't at all. And yet he gets credit for being ahead of major change when nothing really is going to happen. You talk about meddling in another country's affairs. You know, I don't know. I don't live in Israel, obviously. I keep hearing here the '67 borders, not a big deal to Israelis. To me, it seems like suicide. But what do I know? I'm not an Israeli, and I don't live here.



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In the interests of Order and Method: My Schedule of Regular Posts
*Monday through Friday morning - schedules of President, VP and Secretary of State and her diplomats
*Monday through Friday afternoon - List of topics Limbaugh discussed on his program that day*Monday through Friday througout the day - My posts on anything that I feel like talking about. At least one or two a day, sometimes more.
*Saturday through Sunday morning - An addition to my booklist of political books - covering Democrats, Republicans and other interested parties.

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