U.S.-Israeli relations have hit a 35-year low over the contentious east Jerusalem building project. Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren said, “Israel’s ties with the United States are in their worst crisis since 1975 . . . a crisis of historic proportions.”
This is because, according to Barack Obama, Jewish homes in east Jerusalem “hinder peace” with Muslims. According to The Associated Press, “Israel’s already strained relationship with the U.S. hit a new low last week when it announced the construction plans during a visit by Vice President Joe Biden. The timing of the announcement deeply embarrassed the Obama administration and put plans for indirect peace talks with the Palestinians in jeopardy.”
What about the timing of the Palestinian Authority’s “honoring” of a mass-murdering female genocidal bomber, for whom the Palestinians are naming a square in Ramallah? The Jerusalem Post reported: “The ceremony was scheduled to take place on the 32nd anniversary of the attack, the worst terrorist incident in Israel’s history, in which terrorists commandeered a bus and murdered 37 people, including 10 children.”
It too was scheduled to take place during Biden’s visit, but was postponed for a week after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu asked Obama’s Middle East envoy, George Mitchell, to get the Palestinians to cancel it.
“The announcement of the settlements on the very day that the vice president was there was insulting,” said Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Obama adviser David Axelrod also said: “This was an affront; it was an insult, but most importantly, it undermined this very fragile effort to bring peace to that region. For this announcement to come at that time was very, very destructive.”
Neither Clinton nor Axelrod mentioned anything about the honoring of the jihad terrorist being insulting. And it will still take place, just a week late. Yet Obama is pressuring Israel, not the Palestinians.
Jews living in their holiest city is unacceptable, but senior Palestinian Authority officials joining the Fatah youth movement in a “popular inauguration” ceremony for a square named for a terrorist is just fine. The stalkers of the Jews are no hindrance to peace.
What is insulting is America’s abandonment of our most loyal and trusted ally in a region that can only be described as a hot mess, full of backward, oppressive, and brutal hellholes — save for Israel.
America is profoundly pro-Israel; yet Barack Obama is taking on our best friend and most strategic ally in the Middle East and creating an environment, a free zone, for rampant anti-Semitism.
It is no coincidence that as all this unfolded, Palestinian Arabs were rioting every day in Jerusalem and elsewhere, because of their false charge that Israel is trying to destroy Islamic holy sites. And instead of working to calm the situation, the “moderate” Palestinian Authority is trying to make things worse by fabricating yet another libel against the Jews: now they’re saying that Israel tried to burn down Al-Aqsa Mosque in 1969.
This is eerily reminiscent of many of the blood libels spread by Muslim leaders against the Jews throughout history, specifically the ones that the mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, spread in the Muslim world before he co-conspired with Hitler to exterminate the Jews during the Holocaust.
On April 4, 1920, there was carnage in Jerusalem. Muslims spent four days massacring Jews and burning down buildings in the Jewish quarter. The future mufti was arrested and charged with incitement to violence. Historian Maurice Pearlman in his 1947 book “The Mufti of Jerusalem” explains that the riots were touched off by al-Husseini’s “inflammatory articles in the newspaper, Suriyahal Janubiyah.”
Pearlman adds: “In the weeks preceding the attack faked pictures had been disseminated among the Arabs showing the Mosque [of] Omar in ruins. The caption beneath declared that it had been destroyed by Jewish infidels who were now seeking to build on its site the Jewish Temple.”
Fast forward to today, and the situation is eerily similar. According to Palestinian Media Watch, “a non-Jewish Australian started a fire in the Al-Aqsa Mosque on Aug. 21, 1969. The fire was extinguished and the damage was repaired. More than 10 years ago the Palestinian Authority initiated the lie that Israel was involved in the arson or that it [was a] Jew who started the fire with the Israeli government’s help.”
And now they have revived it. Obama should be telling the Palestinians that their libels “hinder peace.” Instead, we are seeing why Obama is at home with Jeremiah Wright, Louis Farrakhan, Bill Ayers, Hugo Chavez, Edward Said, Rashid Khalidi, Samantha Power and self-loathing Jews – as I explain in my forthcoming book “The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War On America” (coming in July from Threshold Editions/Simon & Schuster). I warned the Jews repeatedly.
Obama has worked hard to make the world a safe place for Jew-haters to run amok. Today, in Jerusalem, that’s what they’re doing, and he remains silent.
His silence indicts him.
Pamela Geller is the editor and publisher of the Atlas Shrugs Web site and is former associate publisher of the New York Observer. Her Op-Eds have appeared in The Washington Times, Newsmax, Human Events, Big Government, WorldNetDaily, the American Thinker, Israel National News, and other publications. She is the author (with Robert Spencer) of the forthcoming book The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War on America (Simon and Schuster).
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