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The War On Israel and the Middle East
Posted By Frontpagemag.com On January 5, 2015 @ 12:50 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | No Comments
Below are the video and transcript to the panel discussion “The War on Israel and the Middle East,” which took place at the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s 20th Anniversary Restoration Weekend. The event was held Nov. 13th-16th at the Breakers Resort in Palm Beach, Florida.
Daniel Pipes: I’d like to make three geostrategic points in my few minutes, and I apologize in advance for having to leave, but the plane schedule is as it is. The first point is that — and this has been said before, I’d like reiterate it — that Iran is a far greater threat than ISIS, and we are making an extraordinary mistake in joining with the Iranians against ISIS. Need one point out that ISIS has perhaps $5 million a day in oil revenue and 15,000 troops and, granted, a dynamism, but that Iran is a powerful state of 75 million people, an oil revenue in the hundreds of millions of dollars, billions of dollars, and an army of hundreds of thousands and, of course, a terror network and is building up their weapons? I would predict to you, ladies and gentleman, that ISIS, which appeared so suddenly, will disappear suddenly as well because it has so many enemies, it is so overextended, it is trying to do so much at the same time that it is going to collapse before very long and it is going to disappear as a state whereas Iran is going to be a longer lasting entity.
Let me also predict that the real importance of ISIS, Islamic state, ISIL, Daesh, call it what you will, lies not in this sizeable state that now exists between Bagdad and Turkey but rather in the resurrection of the idea of the caliphate. The last executive caliph with power was in the 940s — 940s, not 1940s — a long, long time ago. Yes, the institution of the caliphate continued until 1924, but it was meaningless. It was just a title. The actual caliphate, executive caliphate, disappeared over a millennium ago and then suddenly, this man who calls himself Caliphate Ibrahim resurrected it on June 29, 2014, and this has sent a frisson of excitement through the Muslim world, and this has created the notion of a feasible caliphate once again after having been gone for millennium, and this is important. I can well imagine other groups taking up this same standard and demanding that they be accepted as the caliphate. I can further imagine that states such as Turkey, Saudi Arabia and even Iran in its own Shiite way taking up the claim of caliphate and so this turns Islamist politics into an even more radical direction than it has been in the past and therefore is a very negative development, but that is an idea, and the notion that the U.S. government should be working with Islam against ISIS is madness, just simple madness.
Iran is the ultimate enemy, which is my second point. Iran is of course the ultimate enemy today. The acquisition by Iranian leadership of nuclear weapons will not only change the Middle East but will change the world. Other tyrants have had nuclear weapons — think of Stalin and Mao — but there’s something different about this group of tyrants in that they’re thinking about the end of days. They’re apocalyptically minded. They have ideas that, were they to deploy nuclear weapons, they would bring forward the days of the Mahdi, the Dajjal, and the other sequence events leading to the day of resurrection, so they are even more dangerous. Now, I could have a nice seminar extending for hours on whether they actually would deploy nuclear weapons or not, but I don’t want to find out, and I suspect you don’t either. It is absolutely imperative that they be stopped from doing that and that would not be easy because the Iranian leadership, like the North Korean leadership, is absolutely determined to get nuclear weapons and will pay whatever price is necessary. In North Korea it was mass starvation. In Iran, it will be economic deprivation and other problems, but they’re going to go ahead and while computer viruses and targeted assassinations and bombings, which have been taking place, will certainly slow things down, they cannot stop it. The only way to stop it is through use of force against the Iranian nuclear installations.
So, that I think is all pretty clear, but I’m going to go beyond that and say that when the happy day comes that the Islamic Revolution of Iran is overthrown — and that is a prospect that is real, we saw one run up toward it in June 2009 and it was suppressed, but it wasn’t eliminated and there will be further attempts — and it is certain that one of these days, the Islamic Republic will collapse. When that happens, I suggest to you, the Iranian people who are sick of this ideological state will become quite friendly. Posts show that the overwhelming majority of Iranians hate their government and hate the Islam that their government is purveying. I think that Iranians will be good friends when that day comes.
In contrast, I think our great problem in the Middle East will be Turkey. Turkey, which is also a very substantial state of some 80 million people and which is in an important strategic location, has a real economy, an educated population. Turkey has approached Islamism – well, the Turkish leadership has approached Islamism — in a far more intelligent way than the Iranians. I call Khomeini, “Islamism 1.0,” and Erdogan, “Islamism 2.0.” Khomeini used revolution and violence and so forth and his successor rules despotically, but Erdogan, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the dominant figure of Turkish politics, is a far more clever figure who has won I think nine elections in 13 years of various sorts, parliamentary, referendum, residential, has tripled the size of the economy and is a figure of enormous importance and popularity in the country. He has a very strong base. This is a not a despotism. Now granted, over time, he’s becoming increasingly authoritarian, autocratic, unpleasant, decisive, but he has won his place democratically, and he will last and his regime will last much longer than Khomeini’s, and I believe as one looks at 10-20 years in the future, it will be Turkey, not Iran, that will be our great problem and that we should be preparing for that today.
And the final point is about the Palestinians. We have seen an upsurge in violence against Jewish Israelis. There’s been more violence in the last month than the prior two years. There are many explanations for this. The collapse of the Kerry peace negotiations, the Hamas war on Israel this summer, the European acceptance of the so called “Palestine,” but I think there’s a more profound point going on that one can see here, which is that since 1920, almost a century ago, with the appointment by the British high commissioner of Hajj Amin al-Husseini to the Muftiship of Jerusalem, the default position of the Palestinian leadership for these 94 years has been rejectionism. That is to say, no acceptance of anything Zionist or Israeli, absolute rejection of the whole thing. Husseini was such a rejectionist that he actually influenced Hitler, recent research shows, towards the Final Solution. The Nazi solution was to push Jews out, but Husseini, as the potential recipient of Jews in Palestine, said no, kill them, and this is something that had an impact on the Nazi leadership.
So, that is the virulence of the Palestinian attitude towards Jews, Zionists and Israel. It was reflected by Yasser Arafat until he died almost two years ago today and since then, it is reflected by Mahmoud Abbas. It is the default position. Now, when in need, when weak, Palestinian leaders such as Arafat and Abbas have been accommodating. The Oslo Accord would be one good example, but when they’re not in need, they revert back to this rejectionism, and of late in particular because the outside world says to both the Palestinian Authority and to Hamas, “We will reward you, no matter what you do. You can kill Jewish Israelis through missiles from Gaza or through car jihad in Jerusalem and you will not pay a price. We will give you money, we will give you arms, we will give you recognition. You don’t have to worry about a thing.” As a result of getting this message that anything they do against Israel and Israelis is all right, the Palestinians have happily reverted to their rejectionist default position and that’s what we’re seeing today. So, I think the blame for this lies in Sweden, in the Obama administration, in the United Nations and elsewhere. It is we, the West, who are saying to the Palestinians, “Go ahead. There’s no price to be paid. We might admonish you in some minor way but we will reward nonetheless for this.” So as long as we, the outside world, say to the Palestinians go ahead, they will go ahead. They will do what they’ve been doing for nearly a century. I see Jamie coming. I better stop. Thank you for coming.
Ken Timmerman: Well good morning. What a great weekend we’ve had together. It’s been really lovely to be here with you, get to know some of you that I did not know before. I do a couple of things in addition to what Jamie mentioned to you in that introduction. I work an awful lot on Iran and I’m going to talk to you about Iran this morning. I lecture on Iran at an outfit run by the Pentagon called the Joint Counterintelligence Training Academy. It’s based in Quantico. We have members of the intelligence community from all 16 branches, organizations of the intelligence community who come in to learn more about Iran, and I’ve been doing this for about the past three years. It’s called the Iran Threat Seminar. And the good news is that the further along we get in these training sessions for younger and some older intelligence officers, the more they seem to know, and the more they know that they don’t know about what’s going on inside Iran. So there is a great thirst I’m finding in the intelligence community, especially in the military courses, to learn about Iran, to learn about Iran’s designs, the designs of the leadership in the Islamic Republic, their goals, who they are, what they are, what they want, where they see themselves going. And they’re not getting it from the academic community that is certainly for sure.
And another thing that I do, I work with victims of terrorism. I have helped a lawsuit called Havlish v. Islamic Republic of Iran. This is the 9/11 case. Ten years ago when I first came out, in my book “Countdown to Crisis: The Coming Nuclear Showdown with Iran,” when I first came out with the information about Iran’s direct, material involvement in the 9/11 attacks, people scoffed at that. They did not believe it, even though the clue was actually in the 9/11 Commission Report itself, which talked about Iran helping the highjackers go in and out of Afghanistan through Iranian territory without getting their visas stamped. Well, I’m happy to report to you that two years ago, December 2011, a district court judge in the State of New York awarded a $6 billion judgment to the families of 9/11 victims against Iran. And so now my job is to be kind of an international Robin Hood and go find the assets of the Islamic Republic of Iran and turn them over to the victims of terrorists in satisfaction of that judgment and we’re in the process of doing that. Yes we are. I have a great picture actually with some of the widows, some of the 9/11 widows, a couple of months ago on the anniversary in New York, with our hands on the building on 53rd Street and Fifth Avenue that belongs to the Alavi Foundation, which is branch of the Islamic Republic of Iran government, well that’s our building. We had our hands on the building. We’re going to get it next year.
The third thing I do is, for many years as a pro bono activity, I’m the president and CEO of the Foundation for Democracy in Iran. We own the web site Iran.org. With a little money, a little help, we will become Iran.gov. We have not had enough of either yet. I happen to believe that if the United States had helped the three million people who were in the streets in 2009 waving signs in English just to make sure that the CNN cameras would capture them, “Obama are you with us?” If we had helped those people then we would today be dealing with a type of Iran that Daniel Pipes just described in the future, a post-Islamic Republic Iran, a pro-American Iran, a nationalist Iran that sees its role in the region as a force of good and of technology and of moderation and not this radical regime that for the past 34 years has seen its mission as spreading Islam, not just through the Middle East but throughout the world.
The Iranian regime sees itself as a global power. This is something that people don’t understand very well. They say, well, they have this tiny army. Their air force is grounded. They can’t get spare parts. Whenever they go up against the United States in a military confrontation, as they did in 1987 and 1988, well, in 12 hours we sunk a third of their navy. It’s true. We did. We sunk a third of their navy in 12 hours. They are not a conventional military force. But they have understood something that we have not. They have understood asymmetrical warfare. They have understood unconventional warfare. They have understood the power of subversion and the power of terror attacks. That is not by accident that Iran, the Islamic Republic of Iran, is the preeminent state sponsor of terrorism because that is their foreign policy. Their foreign policy is terrorism. Okay? And it has been for the past 34 years.
Now when I say Iran sees itself as a global power, what do I mean? They see themselves as an active player in every Muslim country in the world from Malaysia to, get this, Venezuela. All right? They are working on the ground in Malaysia in the banking system, in the community, building mosques, building organizations. They have an intelligence network, which is second to ours, in fact, in many cases they are better and more numerous than our intelligence community. They certainly have more operatives around the world. In Benghazi, which is the subject of my latest book, “Dark Forces,” and I think there’s still a few copies outside if anybody wants them. In Benghazi at the peak they had about a hundred Quds Force officers on the ground during the uprising and against Khadafy.
The Quds Force is the overseas expeditionary arm of the Revolutionary Guards. Okay? These are their professional terrorists. These are the people that they sent to Afghanistan to help the Taliban. I’m sorry, Iran is a Shiite nation. That’s right, they’re not supposed to help the Taliban who are Sunnis. Right? Well Sunnis and Shiites get along just fine when it comes to killing Americans and killing Jews and the Iranians have showed that again and again and again. The Quds Force has their people in Mexico. They have their people in Venezuela. They have their people, as I said, 100 of them on the ground in Benghazi creating anti-Khadafy militias, notably Ansar Al Sharia, and later on directing those militias to attack the United States in our consular facility and the CIA annex. The people asked me, well, why would the Iranians want to do that? What is their goal? Well, the goal is they see themselves as a world power. Who is their enemy? We are their enemy. And they will attack us anywhere they possibly can. When they see a power vacuum, when they see the United States weak, when they see a vulnerability, they will attack us. And they won’t even hesitate to send their terrorists right into our nation’s capital in Washington, DC, as they did not a long time ago when they tried to blow up the Saudi ambassador at the Watergate Hotel Restaurant. Okay? They are not afraid of us. They are not deterred by us.
Qassem Suleimani, the head of the Quds Force, is proudly walking through the streets of Arbiel in Northern Iraq as if he were the prime minister talking to our diplomats, working out deals of how they are going to cooperate with us against Daesh, the Islamic State, ISIL or ISIS, however you wish to call it. So they see themselves as a global power. They see us as the enemy. They attack us wherever they possibly can. In Libya, they saw our vulnerability, and as I describe in “Dark Forces,” their purpose was number one to show that they could attack America anywhere. Number two, to discredit our support for freedom in Libya and three, turn Libya into a failed state and drive the United States out. Guess which one of those objectives they did not achieve? None of them. They achieved all four of their objectives. It was a success. We have never fought back. In fact, we have never fought back against Iran for any of the attacks that they have made on this country.
I got my first taste of this in Beirut in April, 1983, when I was a young reporter on the ground and was interviewing Camille Chamoun, the former president of Lebanon, on one side of town we heard a boom. I ran downstairs and got in a taxi and the taxis inevitably know what’s going on, so they took me immediately to the scene, and our embassy in Beirut was still smoking. People were hanging by cables from the seventh floor swinging in the dust in the smoke. The Marines were dazed. A young press officer came out of the dust, his name was Ryan Crocker, and told us that the ambassador was alive. He had been able to climb down the back by climbing down the wreckage of his desk from the seventh floor. The Iranians have been attacking us militarily through terrorist attacks ever since they took the hostages in 1979. We thought it was over when they turned them back, when they sent the hostages home, when Ronald Reagan was inaugurated. For them it was just beginning. They attack us in Iraq. They attack us in Afghanistan. They attack us in Washington, DC, and they attacked us in Benghazi. They see themselves as a world power and they will attack us everywhere.
Let me say just a couple quick words about the nuclear deal because, it’s tremendously important. It is a tremendously bad idea for us to allow the Islamic Republic to maintain its nuclear weapons capability and that’s what Barak Obama is going to do. It is total insanity. He’s going to allow them to keep their centrifuges and he’s going to allow them to replace the centrifuges that they have with new generation centrifuges. What does that mean? That means that they’re going to be able to jump to nuclear weapons capability in a matter of weeks rather than months or even years. Iran will be able to break out of the nonproliferation treaty the day that they decide to do so and have a nuclear weapons arsenal, not one or two bombs, but an arsenal of six to ten bombs within three months. Within three months. That is what this deal will do for the Islamic Republic. It is a terribly bad idea. Please when you are contacting your members of Congress insist with them that they demand that the administration bring whatever negotiated agreement that they’ve got with the Iranians to Congress so it can be vetted in public. Congress will shoot this down, but they have to bring it before their committees.
So I’m very happy to take your questions later on. I was very glad to hear Daniel Pipes talk about the Caliphate, that was going to be another point I wanted to talk about, so I don’t need to talk about the Caliphate, but the Iranians and the Turks looking forward in ten years will be disputing the leadership of the Islamic Caliphate worldwide. It’s just beginning folks. It’s just beginning. Thank you very much.
Daniel Greenfield: Folks, I have a message for you direct from Secretary of State John Forbes Kerry. ISIS is not Islamic. There is nothing Islamic about the Islamic state. Do you know, according to John Kerry, who is responsible for ISIS recruitment? Guess. Israel, of course, Israel, because you’ve got all the yeshiva boys, they go through Ben Gurion airport, right away they head off to Syria and Iraq to kill Kurds because that’s how it works in Kerryland. But there’s a point to that. The great thing about Israel if you’re Obama or Kerry is that it can be a fall guy for just about everything. Obama broke the Middle East. He wrecked it, which takes a lot of work because the Middle East was kind of broken to begin with. Making it even worse the way that Obama did took actual work, and you have to give Obama credit for that. He actually managed to make the Middle East a worse place. Now there has to be a foreign policy cover up. Somebody has to take the blame for it.
Now the beautiful thing about the peace process is that it’s a Catch 22. Peace is actually impossible and Israel always takes the blame. The Saudis were the first to actually get this done because when the Saudis wanted something, when they were asked well you still have slaves. They abolished slavery, I believe, in 1962 or so. They would say because Israel is destabilizing the Middle East and because there’s all this destabilization in the Middle East, we can’t do these reforms; because it’s too unstable and it’s Israel’s fault. Why is the kingdom of Saudi Arabia as democratic as the Democratic Party? Again because Israel creates all this extremism. It feeds instability. It feeds all this recruitment of terrorists and because of that we can’t possibly democratize.
Why do we have no human rights? Again, same thing. It’s Israel’s fault. That has been the mantra for quite a while and it’s been incredibly successful. The Saudis were able to blame Israel for just about everything and hold out the idea that Israel was going to be the magic solution to everything. You turn the golden key. Israel makes peace with the PLO and suddenly the Middle East, everything in the Middle East, is nice now. The Sunnis and the Shiites get along. They hug each other without actually for once killing each other in the streets and everything works out. All the dictatorships become democracies. It was a really beautiful delusional vision for which Israel was the scapegoat. Now Israel is back to that function again. In term 1, Obama actually sort of did not focus on Israel, which was a good thing because Obama was too big for Israel back then. He had a much bigger foreign policy agenda. Presidents like to focus on Israel and the peace process because they want a Nobel Peace Prize. Obama got a Nobel Peace Prize for just basically showing up. He didn’t need another Nobel Peace Prize. So instead of actually focusing on Israel, instead of berating Israel — you’ve got to do the peace process thing — he worked around Israel. He was trying to transform the region. He was going to use Turkey as the model for transforming the Middle East. There would be a whole bunch of Turkey surrounding Israel. There would be a Turkey in Egypt. There would be a Turkey in Syria. There would be all these Muslim Brotherhood, political Islamic states and they would completely isolate and eventually crush Israel, but this would be a byproduct because Obama was a big, big deep thinker and he had plans for the entire region. And we know how that ended up. You can see half the Middle East is now on fire because of that.
Egypt and Tunisia, as I predicted, had counter revolutions of one kind or another, which reversed the Arab Spring so the Arab spring is dead. The parts of the Arab Spring that aren’t dead are basically consisting of people killing each other in the streets. In Syria and Yemen and Iraq — it’s really too many places to list because Obama does great work. You’ve got to give him credit for that. So Obama was too big for Israel in term 1, but now in term 2 the Arab Spring has collapsed. He’s a lame duck. He lost Congress and you know when presidents become lame ducks they turn to easy targets and Israel is a very easy target to beat up on. It’s easy to go after Israel because it’s an ally. It’s a friendly country, which means, if you’re a bully, that you can punch it in the face and get away with it. And that’s really what we’re seeing now. Obama needs somebody to blame for his current situation in the Middle East. And he’s going back to the same Saudi excuse that the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, lack of a peace process, is destabilizing the region. When John Kerry tells Muslim leaders that ISIS recruitment is being fed by Israel what he’s really saying is that it’s not our foreign policy that’s at fault. It’s certainly not Islam because that would be Islamophobic. No, the problem is of course that Israel doesn’t make peace with the Palestinians, and the peace process is of course completely unworkable because the PLO is being awarded for not making peace with Israel. There is absolutely no incentive for them to make peace and there’s no reason for them to make peace. The entire premise of the peace process is counterintuitive. It’s that you set up a terrorist state, you give terrorists money and you expect the whole thing to work out. Obviously it’s never going to work out. It’s designed not to work out.
But the bigger problem in all that is that the people who champion peace processes, the great so-called “peacemakers” can’t ever actually admit that because they would look like idiots. For example, Clinton briefly admitted that it was Arafat’s fault that he went back to blaming Israel, because if after five years your big incredible conclusion is that Arafat is a terrorist, then people are going to laugh in your face. It took you five years to figure that out. You look like an idiot and it discredits the entire idea that you can negotiate with terrorists. It’s as stupid as taking a bath with a toaster oven, and you not only don’t deserve a Nobel Peace Prize, people should take away any sharp objects lying around your room so you don’t cut yourself. But you know, the big visionary ideas are counterintuitive like Obamacare or the peace process. With Israel and the PLO, even though they’re actually two Palestinians states, one Hamas state, one PLO state, and neither of them can actually get along with each other yet somehow they’re supposed to make peace with Israel. I don’t know exactly how that’s supposed to work, but again I’m not a deep thinker like John Kerry or Barack Obama. But again they don’t really believe that it’s going to work. They don’t expect it to work. What they want is a fall guy for the kind of mess that they’ve made across the region.
Right now Obama has no other policy in the Middle East. His big policies in the Middle East are gone. I mean if he tries to call for a new Arab Spring people are going to laugh in his face. China and Russia are just having fun at his expense these days. His only two goals in the Middle East now are to let Iran get a nuclear weapon and to constantly pressure Israel because it’s also a good way to weaken and distract Israel while Iran does get a nuclear weapon. Right now Israel has few options left because it’s stuck with the idea that if it somehow proves that it wants peace, that it’s willing to make every possible conceivable concession, then finally it’s going to prove that it’s the good guy and the PLO are the bad guys. And it doesn’t understand that it can never actually prove this. It can never actually prove its legitimacy, can never actually discredit the PLO no matter what the PLO does because the entire premise of the system is set up so that nothing the PLO does can be wrong because Israel is being used as the scapegoat for this entire mess. So whatever the PLO does in this last set of negotiations Israel was being told to release terrorists not in exchange for something, not even as part of the negotiations but as part of the negotiations to be able to negotiate. The PLO wanted preconditions for the negotiations or as one of their people said, we want to discuss the discussions and they want preconditions to discuss the discussions. They wanted to release terrorists before they were even going to discuss having a discussion and negotiating peace. That’s how much they want peace. Next time you read about the same concern-trolling New York Times article about how Israel doesn’t really want peace because it’s not willing to make the sacrifices the other side wants preconditions to have discussions about having the discussions about having peace.
But Israel did it. It released about 100 terrorists and of course meanwhile the PLO went to the United Nations. It tried to form a unity government with Hamas purely to sabotage the peace process and whom did John Kerry blame when he went to the Senate Foreign Relations Council? He blamed Israel of course. He said that Israel had failed to release the third batch of PLO terrorists on the day that the PLO wanted them released and that was that. Also they potentially built some houses in Jerusalem and that was that. And it’s Israel’s fault again. Israel faces this kind of Catch 22 because it’s still committed to the idea of proving its righteousness through the two-state solution and that’s a dead end. Caroline Glick I’m sure will talk about her book, “The Israel Solution,” as an alternative, but what I would like to say is that Israel can’t possibly prove its own legitimacy by showing its willingness to deal with terrorists. When you do that you discredit yourself.
There’s a Talmudic court case, which has two people arguing over a coat. Now one says that the whole coat is mine. The whole coat belongs to me. The other person says only half the code is mine. He’s a moderate. He’s legitimate. He’s willing to make some kind of compromise. And the second person, you would think he’s willing to compromise, so give him half the coat. Give the other guy half the coat so it would be a Solomonic decision. But instead the court case goes the other way. The guy who’s actually willing to compromise and willing to take half the coat only gets a quarter of the coat because he gets half his claim. When Israel accepts the premise of the two-state solution, accepts that the so-called Palestinians, which is a brand name for the local Sunni Arab Muslims, have a legitimate case that they’ve suffered, that there’s some sort of potential to work out a peace process with them, then Israel discredits itself. The other side never goes halfway. We’ve talked about the rejectionism earlier, when you reject the other side completely, when you reject 100 percent of the Israeli case then what you’re saying is that I am completely correct and believe it or not the world listens to that. Israel used to say we are 100 percent correct and Israel had a much better public image when it said that we are 100 percent correct. We are the original people of this land. We are the indigenous people. These are the Muslim conquerors. They are trying to kill us. We have the complete right to this land.
Ever since Israel tried to repair its public image with the peace process, with negotiations, with making all kinds of deals and saying that we accept the legitimacy of the other side, that the other side does not accept the legitimacy of Israel even by 1 percent, Israel has destroyed its own public image. Right now Obama has no foreign policy in the Middle East. His foreign policy in the Middle East changes every day, really. It’s bomb Syria. Don’t bomb Syria. No, wait, let’s bomb Syria. No, wait, don’t bomb Syria. There’s a red light. There’s a green light. There’s a yellow light. We’ll arm the rebels. No, we won’t arm the rebels. And this is actually happening. They’re doing this month by month and week by week. They’re completely changing everything nonstop. Only arm the moderate rebels who aren’t shooting at us right this minute. There’s a stupid new plan every five minutes.
The Israel plan, the obsessive John Kerry plan for Israel, is part of that same package, but it’s supposed to be a distraction. It’s the big shiny thing that Obama’s holding up to say that we don’t have to take the blame for this. It’s not our fault. It’s not Obama’s fault that he did his Cairo speech. It’s not his fault that he backed the Muslim Brotherhood. It’s not his fault that he decided to bomb Libya into pieces and turn it over to a bunch of Islamic militias aligned with Al-Qaeda. That’s not any of his fault. You know whose fault it is? Israel’s fault. Until Israel makes the conclusive case that it is completely in the right — not 50 percent in the right, not 60 percent in the right, not 40 percent in the right but 100 percent in the right — it is always going to be used as the punching bag and the scapegoat for Obama, for Kerry, for the PLO, for the Saudis and for every bunch of dictators from here to the Europe, to the United States, to the Middle East.
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