Category Archives: War Commentary

The Obama/Netanyahu Phone Call

The crisis has exploded:

The crisis in the relationship we discuss in our new editorial statement has entered a new and potentially unprecedented phase.

It may well be that the president is going to present American Jews with a choice over the coming months no American president should ask us to make—to become parties to and participants in his effort to create what, in 2009, he called “daylight” between the U.S. and Israel.

…If you want to hate what Netanyahu said, hate it. But here’s the thing: How the prime minister of Israel talks about Israeli citizens who possess equal rights under the law and have their own means of redress under the law if they are mistreated should have no basis whatever in the “assessment” of the bilateral relationship between the United States and Israel. The president has spent years making very nice patter with Turkey’s Erdogan and other foreign leaders whose treatment of minorities do not deserve mention alongside Israel’s and whose suffering small sub-populations have no means of achieving redress.

Even those who are furious with Netanyahu should really take a breath and a close look and consider this point carefully: The Arab-vote business is a pretext. American presidents, this one especially, typically do not revisit special strategic relationships based on election-day maneuvers in a democracy, however unpleasant they might find them. In my view, Obama is hoping once again to use liberal Jewish disaffection in the United States with Netanyahu as a wedge to give him space to make a major policy pivot from the special relationship—one for which he has hungered since he came into office.

Yes.

[Update early evening]

No peace in the Middle East soon, but it’s not because of Bibi.

The idiocy of the left knows no bounds.

Netanyahu

Why is he doing so poorly? As noted, it’s certainly domestic politics — the Israelis have been living with an existential threat since the nation was founded.

[Early afternoon update]

Hmmmm, not sure why I can’t properly embed that tweet, but here it is. he thinks the debate didn’t go well for the opposition, but we’ll see.

The Emails And The Clinton Foundation

It’s not two separate scandals, it’s one big hairy one. It makes perfect sense that if she was soliciting foreign funds while secretary of state, she’d not want to do it from a government email account. And those are likely among the ones she hasn’t turned over (among others).

Much of the Clinton criminality in the nineties was similarly intertwined.

[Update a while later]

Huma Abedin, Hillary’s unindicted email co-conspirator.