PJ: I am amazed when I read and hear so many false claims in the US media about President Obama. The President has always been pro-Israel as well as pro-peace process; he has even demonstrated an intelligent response to stability in the region. You wouldn't necessarily know that when you hear pundits and GOP White House contenders. Conservatives cry about the liberal media but it is they who are winning the message war. Obama's positions are often distorted by false claims by the right wing and his accomplishments (of which there are many) are swept under the rug by a media that seems to march to the tune of the Tea Party lest they be called 'liberal' or 'lamestream'.
The Economist
Feeling Jerusalem
Sep 19th 2011, 16:21 by J.F. | ATLANTA
JOHN HEILEMANN'S article about how Barack Obama came to be painted as anti-Israel is a story about politics that conceals a story about American manufacturing: specifically, to use Mr Heilemann's own phrase, the manufacturing of "perfect bullshit". As Mr Heilemann pungently writes, the Obama administration has "never wavered in going balls-out for Israel". They blocked demands for an independent investigation into the Gaza flotilla raid that left nine activists dead. Security and military agreements between America and Israel remain strong. Mr Obama himself pressured Egypt into freeing Israeli diplomats stuck inside the besieged embassy in Cairo. And he has promised to veto Palestine's statehood vote at the UN Security Council. Even so, he has been pilloried for being "anti-Israel", whatever that means. The three leading Republican presidential candidates have accused him of "throwing Israel under the bus", "thumbing his nose" at Israel and for inviting a curse (points awarded for successfully guessing which candidate used the cliche, which one fears curses and which saw Mr Obama's actions as picking a fight).
Now, we can speculate about why such criticism has stuck, despite Mr Obama's robust support for Israel. Part of it is certainly that Mr Obama lacks the Manichean, with-us-or-against-us worldview of his predecessor; he is much cooler in temperament and rhetoric, and not just toward Israel, either. But I also think Mr Heilemann makes too little of the president's background: if he were President Bobby Howard O'Brien instead of Barack Hussein Obama, there might be some strong policy disagreements coming from the right, but I don't believe the anti-Israel narrative would have taken hold. Images like this would not go straight to the reptile brain. These same nasty innuendos floated around even before Mr Obama's election.
But absent from Mr Heilemann's piece, from the criticism of Mr Obama's would-be rivals, and indeed from the pro-Israel right more broadly is a compelling explanation of what the president should do, should have done, or should be doing.
Here, for instance, Jennifer Rubin works herself into a lather over whether the Obama administration is demanding that Israel agree to withdraw to the 1967 borders before commencing negotiations with the Palestinians. She then stresses over whether the administration is demanding that Israel negotiate with Hamas. Clearly it is doing neither. The 1967 borders have long been recognised as the rough border—not the precise shape, but the approximate one—between two independent states. Does she think that's wrong, and if so, what is her realistic alternative? And here is Jonathan Tobin, doing some serious intellectual acrobatics to blame Mr Obama for the impending Palestinian statehood vote. Apparently, the president failed to realise that Palestinian leaders were too weak to negotiate, and then failed to press them hard enough to negotiate. He "pick[ed] fights" with Binyamin Netanyahu over the status of Jerusalem—for which read "dared to mildly object to but did nothing to stop some settlement construction is East Jerusalem". And somehow, by speaking in support of statehood (as his two predecessors had done), Mr Obama convinced Mahmoud Abbas (who is too weak to negotiate, remember) to abandon the American-sponsored peace process. So it's all Mr Obama's fault.
To critics of the president's Israel policy, I'd like to know, what should the president do? And "stand with Israel" is not a suggestion, it's a slogan.
http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2011/09/america-and-israel
No comments:
Post a Comment