OBAMA TORCHES U.S.-ISRAELI RELATIONS

In a Jerusalem Post column, Caroline Glick wrote about the crises in relations between the U.S. and Israel. She points out that President Obama “has very publicly taken a torch to those relations and he responds to any sign that the flames are waning by dousing fresh kerosene on the fire.”

Here is an excerpt from Glick’s column:

Why are relations with the US now steeped in crisis? The reason relations are so bad, of course, is that Obama has opted to attack Israel and its supporters. In the space of the past 10 days alone, Israel has been subject to three malicious blows courtesy of Obama and his advisers.

First, during his visit to the White House last Tuesday, Obama treated Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu like a two-bit potentate. Rather than respectfully disagree with the elected leader of a key US ally, Obama walked out in the middle of their meeting to dine with his family and left the unfed Netanyahu to meditate on his grave offense of not agreeing to give up Israel’s capital city as a precondition for indirect, US-orchestrated negotiations with an unelected, unpopular Palestinian leadership that supports terrorism and denies Israel’s right to exist.

Next, there was the somewhat anodyne – if substantively incorrect – written testimony by US Army Gen. David Petraeus to the Senate about the impact of the Arab world’s refusal to accept Israel’s right to exist on US-Arab relations.

In the event, the administration deliberately distorted Petraeus’s testimony to lend the impression that the most respected serving US military commander blames Israel for the deaths of US soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. After Petraeus rejected that impression, his boss Defense Secretary Robert Gates repeated the false and insulting allegation against Israel in his own name.

Finally, there is the report this week in Politico in which nameless administration sources accused National Security Council member Dennis Ross of “dual loyalties.”

Ross, of course, has won fame for his career of pressuring successive Israeli governments into giving unreciprocated concessions to Palestinian terrorists. Still, in the view of his indignant opponents in the Obama White House, due to his insufficient hostility to the Israeli government, Ross is a traitor. If Ross wants to be treated like a real American, he needs to join Obama in his open bid to overthrow the elected government of Israel.

These moves would be sufficient to throw US-Israel relations into a tailspin. When combined with the administration’s ultimatum demanding a moratorium on Jewish construction in Jerusalem and its threat to coerce Israel into accepting an Obama plan for Palestinian statehood that will imperil Israel’s security, it becomes abundantly clear that there is no way to make this crisis go away. There is a crisis in US relations with Israel today because the president of the United States has very publicly taken a torch to those relations and he responds to any sign that the flames are waning by dousing fresh kerosene on the fire.