WASHINGTON — Obama the Humble declares there will be no more “dictating” to other countries. We should “forge partnerships as opposed to simply dictating solutions,” he told the G-20 summit. In Middle East negotiations, he told al-Arabiya, America will henceforth “start by listening, because all too often the United States starts by dictating.”
An admirable sentiment. It applies to everyone — Iran, Russia, Cuba, Syria, even Venezuela. Except Israel. Israel is ordered to freeze all settlement activity. As Secretary of State Clinton imperiously explained the diktat: “a stop to settlements — not some settlements, not outposts, not natural-growth exceptions.”
What’s the issue? No “natural growth” means strangling to death the thriving towns close to the 1949 armistice line, many of them suburbs of Jerusalem, that every negotiation over the past decade has envisioned Israel retaining. It means no increase in population. Which means no babies. Or if you have babies, no housing for them — not even within the existing town boundaries. Which means for every child born, someone has to move out. No community can survive like that. The obvious objective is to undermine and destroy these towns — even before negotiations.
To what end? Over the last decade, the U.S. government has understood that any final peace treaty would involve Israel retaining some of the close-in settlements — and compensating the Palestinians accordingly with land from within Israel itself.
[More]
Updates:
4:32 pm EDT, June 5th, 2009 — Obama condemns ‘ignorant and hateful’ Holocaust deniers
An interesting analogy.
To speak to the “Muslim world”, is to speak not to a fact, but rather to an aspiration, and that is the aspiration that Islam shall be a global state religion as its founders intended. To address this aspiration is to breathe life into it. For an American president to validate such an aspiration is madness.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/KF02Ak05.html
Apparently “no dictating’” does not mean for Israel, he seems more than happy to tell them what to do.
Another Lefty hypocrite
“The first problem is that Obama said many things factually quite untrue, some ridiculously so. Pages would be required to list all these inaccuracies. The interesting question is whether Obama consciously lied or really believes it. I’d prefer him to be lying, because if he’s that ignorant then America and the world is in very deep trouble.”
http://www.gloria-center.org/Gloria/2009/06/speaking-flattery-to-power.html
A welcomed change in U.S. foreign policy.
Americans seem to be loosing interest in Obama’s flowery teleprompted rhetoric already, at least according to the latest tracking polls which show that the number of Americans who strongly disapprove of Obama’s performance has grown significantly over the past 5 months and now matches the number who strongly approve at 34%.
Daily Presidential Tracking Poll
http://tinyurl.com/5tnd2b
“As the President makes his case for pressing both sides in the dispute, only 21% expect that peace is likely between Israel and the Palestinians over the next decade. Sixty-six percent (66%) see Israel as an ally of the United States while 29% say the same of Egypt. The number who see Iran, Syria, and Pakistan as allies is much smaller.”
Most likely the 34% of Americans who still strongly approve of Obama’s performance are the same 34% who don’t see Israel as an ally of the United States, and make up his core of support, which doesn’t really give him very much of a mandate to change foreign policy, or anything else for that matter.
The world appeasement and apology tour continues. As usual the only country likely to not benefit from it is Israel.
mid island mike
In other words, this turns a Talmudic precept affirming the value of preserving human life into a prescription for violence and murder against Jews and ‘unbelievers’. Yet Obama passed it off as evidence of the pacific nature of Islam.
So in conclusion, yes, there was some positive stuff in this speech – but it was outweighed by the United States President’s shocking historical misrepresentations, gross ignorance, disgusting moral equivalence between aggressors and their victims, and disturbing sanitising of Islamist supremacism.
In short, deeply troubling.
http://www.spectator.co.uk/melaniephillips/3670626/obama-in-cairo.thtml
Why do I get the feeling that some on the right want the big ‘O’ to fail.
Because we do UV. We’d like to see the economic and political disasters that Obama has us hurtling towards averted.
Since he bragged that Islam invented algebra, that is sure to turn a lot of students againt Islam and O.
Cant be any worse than the mess left by the previous Bush and Clinton governments.
Give the guy a chance.
UV – this guy should have never been given a chance to destroy the Free World, IMO. I blame the Republicans for running McCain (a Vietnam War POW who was far too worried about drawing political blood to concentrate on winning the election). Obama is turning out way worse than I had feared: he is taking over businesses, dictating public opinion, appointing bigots, crooks, tax cheats, agenda driven fanatics….to high public offices, he is mocking Christians, he is mocking America. All that he does points to the blueprint drawn up by the Bolsheviks to take over Russia, in 1917 – Russia enjoyed six months of Freedom before the nation swapped Dictators – what fools the American people were to vote in such a bland, dangerous agenda. I am afraid for all of us.
Jema, are you an American?
No, I am Canadian – and proud of my beautiful country. Many of my relatives live in United States. When my ancestors settled in Western Canada (known as the NW Territories then), the border was nothing more than an imaginary line so my aunts and uncles married Americans and Canadians without thought to which side of the border they lived/came from; my Great Grandfathers/Grandmothers came from Ontario.