YOU CAN'T BE AGAINST THE TERRORISTS AND AGAINST ISRAEL TOO

ISRAEL OR TERRORISTS

Investor’s Business Daily
Editorial
April 16, 2010

WAR ON TERROR: Are we still Israel's staunch ally? Or do we blame the Jewish state for Islamist violence? An increasingly anti-Israeli U.S. government cannot have it both ways.

We now have a president who buys into the longtime Islamist propaganda claim that the lack of an Israeli-Palestinian agreement is causing Islamist terrorism.

Here's the line, taken to its logical conclusion: If only the Iranian-sponsored Hamas terror outfit were handed full control of what it's entitled to next door to Israel, Iraq would magically improve; the Taliban wouldn't fight so hard to make Afghanistan and Pakistan into Sharia states; Osama bin Laden would send a new audio tape to al-Jazeera thanking the Great Satan; and al-Qaida sleeper cells the world over would get orders to continue their slumber indefinitely.

Barack Obama isn't the first president to link a Palestinian accord to the "vital national security interest of the United States," as the president said this week. But he is the first with a policy of bullying the Israeli government to make friends with Muslim powers.

Consider his "New Beginning" speech in Cairo last June.

The Jewish state got plenty of lip service. We heard that "this bond is unbreakable" between the U.S. and Israel. The next day the president even visited the Buchenwald concentration camp to soften the speech's blow.

And what a blow it was. The Nazis' genocide of the Jews was given the "on the other hand" treatment.

Millions of Jews may have been sent to the gas chambers and ovens, but on the other hand, according to the president, "it is also undeniable that the Palestinian people — Muslims and Christians — have suffered in pursuit of a homeland. For more than 60 years they've endured the pain of dislocation. Many wait in refugee camps in the West Bank, Gaza and neighboring lands for a life of peace and security that they have never been able to lead. They endure the daily humiliations — large and small — that come with occupation."

And what is the main obstacle to those Palestinian aspirations?

The domestic policies of the Israeli state — "the United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements," the president told an adoring, largely Muslim audience. "Israel must also live up to its obligation to ensure that Palestinians can live and work and develop their society ... progress in the daily lives of the Palestinian people must be a critical part of a road to peace and Israel must take concrete steps to enable such progress."

The U.S. has embraced the kind of thinking found in political scientists John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt's recent book, "The Israel Lobby."

"Israel may have been a strategic asset during the Cold War," the authors argue, "but it has become a growing liability now" that has "reinforced anti-Americanism around the world, helped fuel America's terrorism problem, and strained relations with other key allies in Europe, the Middle East and Asia."

The truth is that a Palestinian deal will almost certainly embolden Islamist terrorists and their state sponsors, because it would be celebrated as a Jewish defeat.

The likely result: more terrorist recruits, more attacks and more dead innocents, including Americans.

You can't be against the terrorists and against Israel too.

Yet that is exactly the new U.S. policy.