Obama’s Narcissistic Personality Disorder

By Ben Shapiro

3/2/2011

During the 2008 campaign, Hillary Clinton suggested that if the emergency phone rang at 3 a.m. in the White House, you wouldn’t want President Obama picking it up.

She was wrong. Obama wouldn’t pick it up in the first place. He’d let it go to answering machine. He’d be too busy chasing the nearest camera.

Obama is the “Girls Gone Wild” president: Stick a lens in front of him and he’ll take off his shirt, mince about like a coed, and babble nonsensical nothings to an audience oddly fascinated by his antics.

How else to explain Obama’s desperate injection of himself into the Oscars this past Sunday? Even as the Middle East goes up in flames, even as oil prices spike dramatically, even as the national debt skyrockets toward $19.6 trillion by 2015, Obama took time out to tackle a pressing question: What is his favorite movie song? Answer: “As Time Goes By,” from “Casablanca.” Feeling better about the world situation yet?

Obama had a busy week — at least in terms of pop culture. Thursday evening, Obama held yet another party at the White House, this time in honor of Motown music. Celebrity attendees included Stevie Wonder, Jamie Foxx, Smoky Robinson, John Legend, Seal, Sheryl Crow, Nick Jonas and Jordin Sparks. Jamie Foxx summed up the Obamas’ view of what it means to inhabit the “people’s house” in his rendition of Robinson’s “Get Ready”: “We won the election. White House, baby, so much fun!” Meanwhile, Muammar Qadafi shot people at will in the streets of Tripoli, and Americans struggled to pay their rent.

President Obama has become the Salahis of entertainment, cropping up in random places when he’s least wanted. We can’t escape him. He delayed the fifth game of the 2008 World Series, so he could broadcast a 30-minute infomercial for his campaign. He threw out the first pitch at the Major League Baseball All-Star Game in 2009. He did a 10-minute interview with Katie Couric during the 2010 Super Bowl broadcast. In both 2009 and 2010, he did interviews with ESPN to tell the world about his NCAA tournament brackets. In 2010, Obama showed up on “American Idol.” As commander-in-chief, he’s hit “The View,” “The Tonight Show,” “The Late Show” and “Jersey Shore.” OK, he hasn’t hit “Jersey Shore” … yet.

In fact, Obama is worse than the Salahis — at least the Salahis don’t use tax dollars to subsidize their antics. Obama doesn’t just crash other parties — he spends hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars to throw parties of his own. Not that Obama cares; as he put it, “This is a pretty big house so we get lonely. It’s hard for me to move around out there sometimes, so I got to bring the world to me.”

Poor baby.

Obama’s desperate need for attention is clearly a psychological condition. He drinks in applause like a washed-up movie star. It is usual for neglected children to develop narcissistic personality disorder (NPD), typically characterized by an inflated sense of self-importance, a strong sense of entitlement, preoccupations with utopian fantasies, elitism, manipulative tendencies and pathological need for praise.

President Obama was abandoned by his parents during childhood. Now he exhibits the textbook symptoms of NPD. He thinks his powers are godlike in import; “I have a gift, Harry,” Obama once told Sen. Harry Reid. He believes he is entitled to positions of power and prestige. He has never worked a real job in his life, yet deigns to tell the rest of us that he embodies our hopes and dreams. He is obsessed with nonsensical utopian fantasies of one-world peace and harmony in which nuclear weapons are beaten into plowshares.

Obama is an elitist through and through, disdaining ordinary Americans as “bitter [people who] cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them.” He is manipulative in the extreme, seeing every crisis as an opportunity to magnify his personal power.

Most dangerous, he requires a constant stream of paeans to his persona. Radical Muslims, socialists, anti-Semites — so long as they clap, they’re worthy of his warmth. Obama strongly resembles a once-abused puppy; he doesn’t care who pets him, so long as he receives the petting.

With one exception: Obama has no interest in the attention or praise of Americans who challenge his radical agenda. To make himself subject to their philosophy would force him to acknowledge a fundamental truth: His parents abandoned him because they were bad parents, not because America is a “downright mean” country. Obama has told himself for decades that America’s selfishness forced his parents to make him a social outcast. To acknowledge now that the system was largely good and his parents were largely bad would fracture his fragile ego.

So expect to see President Obama on the next telecast of the next big event. He can’t stay away from the cameras, and he certainly won’t leave behind the enthusiastic hurrahs of his supporters. Mr. De Mille, he’s ready for his close-up.

Ben Shapiro

Ben Shapiro is a regular guest on dozens of radio shows around the United States and Canada and author of Project President: Bad Hair and Botox on the Road to the White House.

Would Obama Retaliate against a Nuclear Attack?

By Rabbi
Aryeh Spero

What if a Muslim country, such as Iran, launched a
nuclear attack against us, or if agents aligned with Pakistan using dirty bombs
were to attack America?  Would Barack Hussein Obama retaliate with nuclear
force, as has been our stated policy since the 1950s?  Would he even unleash a
barrage of non-nuclear shock and awe that would level those countries so that
they’d be incapable of striking a second time?

When queried in
Japan in November 2009, Mr. Obama declined to defend President Harry Truman’s
nuclear attack on Hiroshima, despite it having saved hundreds of thousands of
American soldiers who would have otherwise died trying to defeat the
recalcitrant Japanese.  Many on the left and in academia have gone so far as to
characterize it as a display of American racism, questioning if we would have
done so had the victims been British.  They ignore the efficacy of how that
one-time use of a nuclear weapon spared this country from ever being a victim of
nuclear attack.

This is a question the president needs to be asked,
given how he is a proponent of a doctrine labeled Responsibility to
Protect, “R2P.”  The question is, though, what is Mr. Obama’s conceptual
understanding of the term “responsibility” and how will it influence the manner
in which he wages war?

The past may be a guide.  As with all references to
“responsibility,” domestic or foreign, Obama sees responsibility as a type of
sacrifice by the more powerful to those less powerful, be it
redistribution of wealth or sacrificing one’s optimal protection when weighed
against how it effects those he considers innocent.  A nuclear response to a
nuclear attack on us, or even a devastating shock and awe campaign, would
certainly kill many non-combatants Obama would consider
innocent.

The assumption that, as with all presidents, Mr. Obama
would do what is best for America and Americans cannot be taken for granted.
We’ve never before had a president who sees himself primarily as a citizen of
the world and initiates policies not always in the best interests of America but
in the interest of more important (to him) global goals: loans to Brazil for
their offshore drilling, hundreds of millions to Palestinian Arabs and Muslim
countries — increasing an already unbearable debt on Americans to do so.  Not
to mention how he has tried every which way to stop Arizonans (Americans) from
protecting themselves from murder, rape, thievery, and destruction of their
property from mobs cascading into our open borders — doing so, as he always
does, by invoking some universalist “morality” and mission that, in his mind,
supersede our parochial needs.  He has reneged on our commitment for a
space shield for our allies in Eastern Europe while offering it to Russia, a
threat to America.

Indeed, Obama has spent much time traversing the globe
apologizing to all those countries that he claims have been the target of
“arrogant” American military power.  Would he, then, be inclined to use the
essence of American military power, its nuclear force?  Many around the world
will not be deterred from going nuclear against us unless it is unequivocally
understood that they will be annihilated if they do so.

None of this is remotely to imply that the president
would be sanguine if our country were attacked; rather, one wonders if he has
the stomach to retaliate overwhelmingly against the attackers, especially since
he could rationalize his reluctance in terms of a “higher morality” that says:
we can’t bring back our dead by killing citizens elsewhere who did not pull the
trigger against us.  His dilemma will be compounded if a dirty bomb or EMP were
launched against us not by a government per se but by a group of terrorists
independent of a government which nonetheless gives them sanctuary.  After all,
the Arab/Muslim cause has been very adept and successful in demanding that its
territories and people be spared retaliation by claiming that terrorism is the
work of individuals and not a particular state or government — and Mr. Obama is
part of that chorus.

Furthermore, are we certain that Mr. Obama considers
American life more important than, say, Iranian life, or that there is something
exceptional about America that warrants choosing it and its people over the
exceptional nature he has equally granted other countries and peoples?  Forget
all these assumed notions that a president will always do what is best for
Americans — it boils down to Mr. Obama’s moral compass.  If he thinks the way I
think he does, he may likely consider it immoral to kill Pakistanis in order to
save Americans, or Canadians.

The question becomes more acute if the attack comes
from a Muslim source.  And that is because Mr. Obama demonstrates an unbreakable
political and ethnic simpatico (though not necessarily religious) with Muslim
causes and Muslim
people to a degree not seen in any Western leader today or before.  What
president designates an entire government agency, NASA, to forgo its intrinsic
purpose and changes it to Muslim
Outreach?

Be it bowing to Saudi kings, funneling billions to
Muslim
causes around the world, ordering expanded immigration of Muslims
into this country, waxing poetic about the “holy” Koran, instituting White House
Ramadan Dinners, and re-writing American history to pretend some type of
significant early historical relationship with Islam, as well as maneuvering to
transform ancient Jerusalem, the Jewish spiritual capital, into an Islamic
capital — all of this shows a man whose identity and heart are very tied up
with things Islamic.  There is something operating within the bosom of Obama
beyond so-called political even- handedness.  It is a love
affair.

Obama the Christian made his feelings clear in his
book, The Audacity of Hope (pg.261), that if
elected he would stand with Islam, no matter the prevailing winds against it.
And why not?  His family back in Africa is Islamic.  In his Cairo speech he said
America will never be at war with Islam and that he sees his duty as president
of the United States to fight against any type of stereotyping of Islam, no
matter where.  Would he be willing, then, to use nuclear armaments against a
society he endlessly keeps telling us is peace-loving and full of compassion and
justice?

Deep down, Obama may consider such wholesale
retaliation as racist, since its victims are of a darker skin color than
Anglos.  One cannot minimize the extent to which Obama and the left have
expanded the definition of racism and how averting “racism” has become the
centerpiece of all decision-making, overshadowing and surpassing even needs for
defense.  Even now, Obama leaves the country vulnerable to jihadist plans with
his refusal to ever mention the name Islam or Islamic when forced to comment on
the many attacks by young Islamists on this country during the past few years.
He has done nothing to stop Iran from engineering its nuclear bomb and seems to
be standing in the way of those who would like to protect us from a future
nuclear inferno. Addressing the Manhattan Institute last week, former Attorney
General Michael Mukasey warned of an Obama administration that implements
policies that sacrifice an optimal protecting of Americans for what it considers
even more important: making sure that there is no domestic backlash against Muslims.

There are those who point to his willingness to fight
in Iraq and Afghanistan.  But Obama’s new “rules of engagement,” designed to
save Muslim
lives and honor Muslim sensitivities, have resulted in many unnecessary American
deaths.  This itself should prove the inverted priorities and danger inherent in
his version of warfare — it is American life which is sacrificed in the name of
responsibility.  Truth be told, in Iraq and Afghanistan, Obama has not taken on
Islamic governments, rather the Taliban,
which he considers an enemy of Islamic regimes.  It is unclear, however, if he
would actually go to war against an actual Islamic regime or government when the
need to do so is specifically American and does not accrue to the benefit of the
Islamic world.

Can we rely on his constitutional obligation to defend
America?  He may very well consider the defense of America to be better served
through threats of retaliation but not retaliation itself, or he may prefer
negotiation as the better route to defense, more “consistent with our values,”
as he often intones.  Nowhere is it written that he must constitutionally defer
to his predecessors’ notion of what constitutes an appropriate response.
Perhaps he will bypass the Constitution, as he has so often done in domestic
affairs, under the rationale that he inherited these problems from Bush.  Will
our military have to wait for a second round of attacks while the president
wavers or consults with Samantha Power?

Campaigns provide that one season and window where a
president can’t hide in the White House and be shielded from the tough
questions.  But it only happens if his opponents raise the issues publicly since
the media seem unwilling to make Mr. Obama uncomfortable.

Our candidates should pose this very question. And
this time we need direct, clear answers — no Obamaspeak, no bureaucratic mumbo
jumbo. America needs to know, and so does the world.

Rabbi Spero is president of Caucus
for America and can be reached at
(212)252-6861.

“Fast and Furious”Guns Show Up at More Crime Scenes

Sharyl Attkisson,CBSNews.com

There are new details on the scope of violence surrounding thousands of
weapons federal agents allegedly allowed to fall into the hands of criminals.
The Justice Department reports “Fast and Furious”guns have been recovered at 11
violent crime scenes in the United States. Those crime scenes,in addition to the
murder of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry in Dec. 2010,puts the total number of
U.S. crime scenes connected to “Fast and Furious”at 12.

The number is provided
for the first time in a written response to Republicans investigating the
gunwalker scandal. In the case,agents from the Bureau of Alcohol,Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) say
they were ordered to allow thousands of weapons into the hands of suspected gun
traffickers for Mexican drug cartels. In its letter,the Justice Department
indicates it doesn’t have enough information to know how many weapons have been
used in violent
crimes south of the border in Mexico.

Senator Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) and Representative Darrell Issa (R-CA) are
leading
the Congressional probe. Today,they issued a sharp letter accusing the Department of Justice (DOJ) of playing “word
games,”and reneging on its agreement. The agreement provided that Congress would
allow the nomination of the Justice Department’s choice for Deputy Attorney
General,James Cole,to move forward in June. In return,the Justice Department
would give detailed answers to specific questions about the ATF gunwalker
scandal. The Justice Department did provide some answers but,according to the
Republicans,fell short of providing the full and complete responses promised.
For example,the DOJ allegedly failed to provide all available details of the 11 violent
crimes. The Justice Department says it’s reviewing the letter.

In their letter,Grassley and Issa also say….

Read
more.

Obama Cuts Controversial Muslims from White House Iftar Guest List

Neil Munro,The Daily Caller

The White House’s published guest list for this year’s Ramadan Iftar dinner
was much shorter than previous years’ roster. It excluded the names of several controversial advocates who have
attended the event in the past,including some who The Daily Caller can
confirm did attend on Wednesday night.

“It was a squeaky clean list,” said Durriya Badani,director of the
U.S.-Islamic World Forum,an annual event organized by the Brookings
Institution’s Saban Center and the Qatari government. The guests on the
published list are “not controversial at all,” said Badani,whose name is on the
list the White House provided to reporters.

“It was a lot more low-key … It was a more intimate event this year,” said
Haris Tarin,the Washington director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council,whose
invitation was kept off the published list. “I have no idea why they didn’t
publish [MPAC’s invite] … I’m going to learn about that a little bit more,” he
told The Daily Caller.

Mohamed Magid also attended but did not appear on the White
House’s publish list. Magid is imam of the All Dulles Area Muslim Society mosque in Northern
Virginia and the current president of the Islamic Society of North America.
Along with MPAC,Magid’s two organizations have drawn criticism from a loose
network of online critics who claim they are sympathetic to Islamist groups.

Whether intentional or not,the shorter list limited the risk of a political
embarrassment for the White House because it downplayed the attendance of
several ideological
Islamist groups,including MPAC

Read more.

Is Obama a pathological liar?

Is Obama a pathological liar?

“Mendacity is a system that we live in.”

– Brick, “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof”

In the weird world that is Washington, men and women say things daily, hourly, even minutely, that they know deep down are simply not true. Inside the Beltway, we all call those utterances “rhetoric.”

But across the rest of the country, plain ol’ folk call ’em lies. Bald-faced (even bold-faced) lies. Those folks have a tried-and-true way of determining a lie: If you know what you’re saying is patently false, then it’s a lie. Simple.

And lately, the president has been lying so much that his pants could burst into flames at any moment.

His late-evening news conference Friday was a tour de force of flat-out, unadulterated mendacity — and we’ve gotten a first-hand insider’s view of the president’s long list of lies.

“I wanted to give you an update on the current situation around the debt ceiling,” Mr. Obama said at 6:06 p.m. OK, that wasn’t a lie — but just about everything he said after it was, and he knows it.

“I just got a call about a half-hour ago from Speaker [John A.] Boehner, who indicated that he was going to be walking away from the negotiations,” he said.

Not so: “The White House made offers during the negotiations,” said our insider, a person intimately involved in the negotiations, “and then backtracked on those offers after they got heat from Democrats on Capitol Hill. The White House, and its steadfast refusal to follow through on its rhetoric in terms of cutting spending and addressing entitlements, is the real reason that debt talks broke down.”

Mr. Boehner was more blunt in his own news conference: “The discussions we’ve had with the White House have broken down for two reasons. First, they insisted on raising taxes. … Secondly, they refused to get serious about cutting spending and making the tough choices that are facing our country on entitlement reform.”

But back to the lying liar and the lies he told Friday. “You had a bipartisan group of senators, including Republicans who are in leadership in the Senate, calling for what effectively was about $2 trillion above the Republican baseline that theyve been working off of. What we said was give us $1.2 trillion in additional revenues,” Mr. Obama said.

That, too, was a lie. “The White House had already agreed to a lower revenue number — to be generated through economic growth and a more efficient tax code — and then it tried to change the terms of the deal after taking heat from Democrats on Capitol Hill,” our insider said.

The negotiations just before breakdown called for $800 billion in new “revenues” (henceforth, we’ll call those “taxes”), but after the supposedly bipartisan plan came out — and bowing to the powerful liberal bloc on Capitol Hill — Mr. Obama demanded another $400 billion in new taxes: a 50 percent increase.

Mr. Boehner was blunt: “The White House moved the goalpost. There was an agreement, some additional revenues, until yesterday, when the president demanded $400 billion more, which was going to be nothing more than a tax increase on the American people.”

But Mr. Obama, with a straight face, continued. “We then offered an additional $650 billion in cuts to entitlement programs — Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security.”

The truth: “Actually, the White House was walking back its commitments on entitlement reforms, too. They kept saying they wanted to ‘go big.’ But their actions never matched their rhetoric,” the insider said.

Now, Mr. Boehner and the real leaders in Congress have taken back the process. He’ll write the bill and pass it along to the president, with this directive, which he reportedly said to Mr. Obama’s face in a short White House meeting Saturday: “Congress writes the laws and you get to decide what you want to sign.”

Watching the one-third-of-a-term-senator-turned-president negotiate brings to mind a child spinning yarns about just how the living room lamp got broken. Now, though, the grown-ups are in charge; the kids have been put to bed. Ten days ago, the president warned the speaker: “Dont call my bluff.”

Well, Mr. Boehner has. He’s holding all the cards — and he’s not bluffing.

• Joseph Curl covered the White House and politics for a decade for The Washington Times. He can be reached at jcurl@washingtontimes.com.

Obama’s Whole Lotta Nothing

By Jerry
Shenk

That was then; this is now: Now America is facing a
sovereign debt crisis caused by excessive government borrowing and spending,
exacerbated by a recession and by actuary-confirmed, financially unsustainable
commitments to entitlements.

The failure of government to budget and spend
responsibly isn’t a Democratic or Republican issue.  American politicians have
taxed, borrowed and spent far too much money.  It’s irrational and purely
ideological for progressives who support Obama to use what they see as Bush
administration shortcomings to excuse or defend even greater excesses by the
current president and his Democratic congressional allies.

America is about to reach a debt ceiling with an
administration-applied deadline of August 2.  The president says there will be
“fiscal Armageddon” if Congress doesn’t act to raise the debt limit.  So, with
the clock ticking down, what is the president’s plan to reduce spending?  He has
proposed…nothing.

Regardless, on July 19, 2011, House Republicans gave
the president the debt ceiling increase and political cover he wanted.  As part
of a “Cut,
Cap, and Balance”
bill (CCB), the House authorized raising the debt limit by the $2.5 trillion
Obama requested to see him through the 2012 election.  Enacted in the absence of
administration leadership, CCB has some modest strings
attached.

The new debt ceiling would only be effective if a
two-thirds majority in both Houses of Congress passes a balanced-budget
amendment to the Constitution and sends it to the states for eventual
ratification or rejection.  CCB also calls for a minimal $111 billion in
spending cuts in FY2012, only $1.5 trillion in cuts over the next ten years, and
firm caps on federal spending at roughly 19 percent of GDP by 2020.  The $1.5
trillion in cuts over the remainder of the decade is less than the government
will borrow this year.

The CCB bill punts on entitlements, proposing no
immediate changes to our largest fiscal problems: Medicare, Medicaid, and Social
Security.  CCB is a major concession by House Republicans, especially by those
sent to Washington following the grassroots-influenced wave election of 2010.
President Obama has vowed to veto the bill if it passes the Senate.  Obama’s
alternative to CCB is…nothing.

Obama has given speeches and held press conferences to
declare his willingness to “make difficult choices,” but he has never enumerated
a single compromise, reform or “difficult choice.”  Obama has
committed…nothing.

In a recent press conference, Obama was asked what
Medicare reforms he’d accept.  He responded, “There’s lots of options on the
table,” but refused to be more specific.  Obama
answered…nothing.

A FY-2012 budget was passed by the Republican House of
Representatives.  The president has rejected it, but, as an alternative, he has
offered…nothing.

To be fair, the president did deliver a rambling,
detail-free “budget” speech in May on which Douglas Elmendorf, the Democrat who
is director of the Congressional Budget Office, commented, “We don’t score
speeches.”  Translation: “The president offered…nothing.”

It’s true that earlier Republican majorities failed to
act, but the Democratic Party which held the White House and majorities in both
Houses of Congress from January 2009-January 2011 (and which still controls the
Senate and White House) has failed monumentally.  Not only have Washington
Democrats increased the debt by more than $5 billion in three years, they
haven’t produced a budget in more than two years.  Though they have paid lip
service to deficit reduction, other than tax increases, Democrats have
offered…nothing.

National politicians have ensured that every child
born here today is already nearly $50,000 in debt, money that must be taken from
wages none will begin earning for two decades or more — debt that increases and
compounds relentlessly.  Absent constitutional requirements to balance budgets
or fix spending caps, our system doesn’t self-correct.  If it must rely on
politicians to correct the problems they caused, America may be
doomed.

It has become very clear.  The president has nothing
to offer that will make him or his party fiscally responsible or our nation
financially sound. President Obama and his liberal enablers in the Democratic
Party, unions, the media and the academy only want to borrow and spend more, and
they want tax hikes to pay for new spending and debt service.

But, in March, 2006, during Bush 43’s second term,
speaking from the floor of the US Senate, then-Senator Obama said:

The fact that we are here today to debate raising
America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure.  It is a sign that the US
Government cannot pay its own bills.  It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing
financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our Government’s reckless
fiscal policies.  Increasing America’s debt weakens us domestically and
internationally.  Leadership means that, “the buck stops here.’  Instead,
Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our
children and grandchildren.  America has a debt problem and a failure of
leadership. Americans deserve better.

Senator Obama’s statement is more true now than it was
then.

Jerry Shenk is co-editor of the Rebuilding America,
Federalist Papers 2 website©: www.federalistpapers2.org.

Report: Obama to call for Egypt debt forgiveness today

Thomas Lifson

According to Josh Gerstein of Politico,
President Obama’s much-hyped speech today at the State Department regarding the
Middle East will include praise for the Arab Spring and a call for debt
forgiveness to provide  “cash flow relief” to the new Egyptian government. This
would be the very same new government that is moving away from its peace treaty
with Israel and cozying up to Iran, providing Suez Canal transit to Iranian
warships, so they can cruise off Israel’s Mediterranean coast.

Since the US government is heavily indebted to China, such a move would
amount to borrowing money from China and others to decrease Egypt’s foreign
debt, as a reward for moving against peace with Israel.

Instead of honestly recognizing that Islamism is the root of protest and
threat to the West in Egypt, Obama is apparently recycling the old economic
arguments. Gerstein writes:

“We see this as a critical window of time for the United States to take
concrete action,” a senior administration official told reporters Wednesday
during a conference call previewing Obama’s speech.

“The political movements of nonviolent protest that we’ve seen are rooted
in part in a lack of opportunity in the region. You have very large populations
of young people, many of whom – too many of whom – cannot find a job,” said the
official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “We think it’s important to note
that some of the protests in the region are deeply rooted in a lack of
individual opportunity and economic growth as well as a suppression of political
rights.”

At least the language is hedged here: “some of”, “may be” and the like. But
no effort at all is made to connect a religion which idealizes a 7th century
social order as the perfect  state of Allah’s plan for mankind with economic
stagnation and lack of opportunity. Nor the possibility that a religion which
posits jihad against the infidel as the highest duty might hobble its economic
prospects and social structure.Osama
Bin Laden shares President Obama’s enthusiasm for the Arab Spring. Erin
Bonsteel captures the situiation well:

Obama says Palestine must be based in 1967 borders

53 mins ago

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama is endorsing the Palestinians’ demand for
their future state to be based on the borders that existed before the 1967
Middle East war, in a move that will likely infuriate Israel. Israel says the
borders of a Palestinian state have to be determined through negotiations.

In a speech outlining U.S. policy in the Middle East and North Africa, Obama
on Thursday sided with the Palestinians’ opening position a day ahead of a visit
to Washington by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu is
vehemently opposed to referring to the 1967 borders.

Until Thursday, the U.S. position had been that the Palestinian goal of a
state based on the 1967 borders, with agreed land swaps, should be reconciled
with Israel’s desire for a secure Jewish state through negotiations.

President to Renew Muslim Outreach

By JAY SOLOMON                And CAROL E. LEE

WASHINGTON—President Barack Obama is preparing a fresh outreach to the Muslim world in coming days, senior U.S. officials say, one that will ask those in the Middle East and beyond to reject Islamic militancy in the wake of Osama bin Laden’s death and embrace a new era of relations with the U.S.

View Full Image

MOHAMMED HUWAIS/Agence France-Presse/Getty ImagesProtesters in Yemen Tuesday continue demonstrations demanding the resignation of President Ali Abdullah Saleh.

Mr. Obama is preparing to deliver that message in a wide-ranging speech, perhaps as early as next week, these officials say. The president intends to argue that bin Laden’s death, paired with popular uprisings sweeping North Africa and the Middle East, signal that the time has come to an end when al Qaeda could claim to speak for Muslim aspirations.

“It’s an interesting coincidence of timing—that he is killed at the same time that you have a model emerging in the region of change that is completely the opposite of bin Laden’s model,” Ben Rhodes, deputy national security adviser at the White House, said in an interview.

Since January, popular uprisings have overthrown the longtime dictators of Tunisia and Egypt. They have shaken rulers in Libya, Bahrain, Syria, Yemen and Jordan, marking the greatest wave of political change the world has seen since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

But the push for democracy appears to have stalled in some countries. The street protests against Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi have morphed into a civil war, with North Atlantic Treaty Organization backing the rebels. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and Bahrain’s ruling Khalifa family have both met demonstrations with violence.

Related Articles

• Bin Laden’s Son Says the Killing Was Illegal
• Bin Laden Death Roils GOP Race
• Libyan Officials Profit From Migrants
• Syria Extends Armed Push

Bin Laden’s death gives Mr. Obama a chance to underscore the belief among many administration officials that the terror leader’s relevance had already begun to diminish during the so-called Arab Spring. Mr. Obama, who has made outreach to the Muslim world a cornerstone of his presidency, plans to describe the Islamic world as at a crossroads, said U.S. officials, making the case that bin Laden represented a failed approach of the past while populist movements brewing in the Middle East and North Africa represent the future.

Mr. Rhodes said timing of the speech remains in flux but Mr. Obama could deliver it before leaving on a five-day trip to Europe on May 23. The White House is already telegraphing the message of the coming speech to the Islamic world by placing American diplomats on Arab television and radio, according to U.S. officials.

The White House is still debating, however, whether Mr. Obama should lay out a concrete plan for revitalizing the stalled Arab-Israeli peace process.

Many Arab governments have been pressing Mr. Obama to publicly outline his own parameters for the creation of an independent Palestinian state as a way to exert more pressure on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who visits Washington next week. These diplomats said the Mideast’s democratic surge is raising expectations among their own populations for an end to the decades-old Arab-Israeli conflict.

White House officials said they are still reassessing the monumental changes in the Middle East and whether an aggressive U.S. push to resume peace talks would likely be successful.

Last week, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas forged a unity government with the militant group Hamas, which the U.S. and European Union designate a terrorist group. Israeli officials have already cited Hamas’s role in the Palestinian Authority as the reason why Mr. Netanyahu is unlikely to unveil any major new overtures to the Palestinians during his Washington trip.

“We need to sort through these issues as we consider the next steps on a peace process,” Mr. Rhodes said. The May 20 Obama-Netanyahu meeting “is a chance for the U.S. and Israel to review the full range of issues, from Iran to the regional change to the peace process.”

Arab officials and Mideast peace advocates say there are major risks for the U.S. and Israel in delaying a return to talks.

Mr. Abbas is pressing the United Nations to recognize an independent Palestinian state during the September gathering of the General Assembly. He has specifically cited his frustration with the lack of progress in negotiations with Mr. Netanyahu, as well as the rising expectations among his own people as a result of the Arab Spring.

“There’s clearly a lot going on in the region, and there’s a case to be made and some are making it, that now is not the time,” said Jeremy Ben-Ami, founder of J-Street, a U.S. lobbying group that advocates Washington laying out its own peace plan, something Israel’s government opposes. “But we do believe that the only way to avoid U.N. action on a Palestinian state in a unilateral kind of way is for either the president or prime minister to put forward” a peace plan.

A number of lawmakers have cited Hamas’s new alliance with Mr. Abbas as reason for the White House to move slowly in restarting the peace process. Mr. Netanyahu is scheduled to address a joint session of Congress during his Washington visit as well the annual conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the U.S.’s most powerful pro-Israel lobby.

Avigdor Lieberman, Israel’s foreign minister, on Tuesday broke with Israel’s policy of keeping quiet on the regional turmoil, saying the international community’s response to repression of demonstrations in Syria, Lybia and Yemen has been “inconsistent” and “confusing.” In remarks delivered before Mr. Netanyahu’s scheduled White House visit, Mr. Lieberman added that the confusion sends a “damaging message to the people of the Middle East, and further erodes the path to peace, security and democracy for our region.”

Mr. Obama is also scheduled to meet Jordan’s King Abdullah II in Washington next week. The Arab monarch has been at the forefront of Mideast leaders calling for the U.S. to impose its own peace plan on the Israelis and Palestinians. Jordan’s population is 60% Palestinian, and the king has faced his own popular protests in recent months.

The Muslim Brotherhood is officially A-OK for the Obama Administration

Richard Baehr

 

Professor Barry Rubin argues in his latest article
that the Administration’s approach to the new Middle East is becoming clearer,
and that it represents the worst single strategic blunder in American foreign
policy in the Middle East in decades. In essence, the Obama team has decided
that it can live with and work with  Islamist regimes  in the Middle East, so
long as Al Qaeda is not the group in power.

In other words the Muslim Brotherhood is just fine, if it succeeds in
taking power in Egypt and other Arab countries currently in turmoil. Rubin
quotes  the new policy as described in a Washington Post article
and then offers his reaction:

“The administration is already taking steps to distinguish between various
movements in the region that promote Islamic law in government. An internal
assessment, ordered by the White House last month, identified large ideological
differences between such movements as the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and
al-Qaeda that will guide the U.S. approach to the region.”

Get it?
Al-Qaeda is bad because it wants to attack U.S. embassies, the World Trade
Center, and the Pentagon.

BUT the Muslim Brotherhood is good! Because it
merely wants to seize state power, transform Egypt into an Islamist state, rule
90 million people, back Hamas in trying to destroy Israel, overthrow the
Palestinian Authority, help Jordan’s Muslim Brotherhood overthrow the monarchy,
and sponsor terrorism against Americans in the Middle East.

I’m sure you
can see the difference. This is the nonsense that the administration has been
working toward for two years. It is the doctrine pushed by the president’s
advisor on terrorism, elements in the CIA, and White House ideologues. The State
and Defense departments are probably horrified.

Here’s the next
paragraph:

“`We shouldn’t be afraid of Islam in the politics of these
countries,'” said a senior administration official….`It’s the behavior of
political parties and governments that we will judge them on, not their
relationship with Islam.'”

That first phrase is correct. We shouldn’t be
afraid of Islam in the politics of these countries. Islam has always been
present in Egypt and Jordan, Saudi Arabia or post-Saddam Iraq, and even Iran
before its revolution and Afghanistan not under the Taliban. But we should be
very afraid of Islamism in the politics of these countries. “

.    .    .   .

For weeks, the Administrations’ favorite newspaper, the New York Times has
been paving  the way for the new policy with a series of opinion pieces and news
stories on the new “moderate” face of the Muslim Brotherhood,  their commitment
to non-violence, their discipline and social service role.

The new policy is in some ways consistent with the docile American attitude
towards Iran- where engagement was tried and failed, weak sanctions were applied
with enough loopholes to make them like swiss cheese slices, the anti-regime
demonstrations were ignored and garnered no support, and military action was
never contemplated.  The result- the Administration is now preparing for a
nuclear Iran , and all that is left is finding a way to contain Iran’s
aggressive posture once it becomes a nuclear power.