June 8, 2008 — budsimmons
Change we can all believe in
Friday, 6th June 2008So the new dawn of American politics has brought us, on day one, what exactly? First off, Obama makes a speech to the American Jews of AIPAC that is such a brazen piece of cynicism as to make one’s eyes water. The man whose support for Israel has hitherto been, let us say, equivocal, who thinks ‘no-one is suffering more than the Palestinian people’ who he therefore thinks are suffering more than the Israelis they routinely murder, whose every foreign affairs adviser is viscerally hostile towards Israel with one of them, Daniel Kurzer, saying last month that Israel should surrender part of Jerusalem to the Arabs, suddenly tells the Jewish lobby group AIPAC in his first major speech after clinching the Democratic nomination that he is Israel’s bestest friend in the whole wide world and insists that
Jerusalem must always remain the capital of Israel and must never be divided.
His number one fans in the Middle East, Hamas, didn’t like that one little bit; nor did that man of peace Mahmoud Abbas. But they needn’t have thrown their keffiyehs out of their prams so quickly. For within hours Obama had backtracked, as the Jerusalem Post reports:
Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama did not rule out Palestinian sovereignty over parts of Jerusalem when he called for Israel’s capital to remain ‘undivided,’ his campaign told The Jerusalem Post Thursday’’. .. a campaign adviser clarified Thursday that Obama believes ‘Jerusalem is a final status issue, which means it has to be negotiated between the two parties’ as part of ‘an agreement that they both can live with.’ ‘Two principles should apply to any outcome,’ which the adviser gave as: ‘Jerusalem remains Israel’s capital and it’s not going to be divided by barbed wire and checkpoints as it was in 1948-1967.’
I think this is what’s called ‘change we can believe in’.
How can someone who goes in for this kind of outrageous doublespeak – not to mention claiming that talking to Iran without preconditions amounts to tough and principled diplomacy possibly be considered a serious contender for the American Presidency? The man represents a positive danger to the free world. Are the Americans completely nuts?
