Thursday, June 03, 2010

The Obama Administration Buckles Under Islamic Pressure To Condemn Israel


by Joseph Klein

The Obama administration continues to push Israel under the bus.

Last week, it agreed to language in the final outcome document of the United Nations’ Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty Review Conference that mentions only Israel – not Iran - in the context of demanding a nuclear-free Middle East. And at the UN Security Council this past weekend, the Obama administration sided with Israel’s enemies in putting Israel on the defensive over its blockade of Hamas-controlled Gaza.
As EyeontheUN editor Anne Bayefsky put it:

In the past twenty-four hours United Nations bodies have engaged in a frenzied attack on Israel over the Turkish-facilitated effort to end the naval blockade of Hamas-controlled Gaza. In the process, the Obama administration’s Israel policy has been outed.

The UN Security Council unanimously agreed on a Presidential Statement that placed all of the blame on Israel for the fatalities that occurred during the latest attempt by Hamas supporters to break the Israeli blockade. The statement was written and approved with speed atypical for UN deliberations, in order to accommodate the wishes of the out-going president of the Security Council, who happened to be the representative of Lebanon.

The Obama administration gave the Lebanese representative, and his Islamic ally from Turkey who also sits on the Security Council, its blessing. As usual, the UN document contains no context behind the tragic incident.

If the humanitarian needs of the people of Gaza were the Free Gaza Movement’s first concern, they would have accepted Israel’s repeated offers to allow their cargo to be delivered to Gaza after the Israelis had an opportunity to inspect to ensure that there were no weapons aboard. They refused because embarassing Israel was their primary objective.

The self-proclaimed plan of the flotilla sponsors was to provoke a violent clash at sea, taken right out of Saul Alinsky’s playbook.

Here is what the Gaza Freedom March, a coalition focused on breaking the Israeli blockade, said before the confrontation at sea occurred as quoted in a Palestinian publication entitled Intifada:

A violent response from Israel will breathe new life into the Palestine solidarity movement, drawing attention to the blockade.

The Free Gaza Movement, which had organized smaller efforts to break Israel’s blockade in the past, teamed up this time with a Turkish group, Insani Yardim Vakfi (known as IHH), to raise money and assemble a larger flotilla. IHH appears to have had connections with Hamas.

We have also learned that the so-called humanitarian flotilla included a number of non-humanitarian Islamic jihadists. According to a report by MEMRI, the Egyptian flotilla delegation included two members of the Muslim Brotherhood bloc in the Egyptian parliament: Muhammad Al-Baltaji and Hazem Farouq. Al-Baltaji, who is deputy secretary-general of the Muslim Brotherhood parliamentary bloc in Egypt, said that his movement “will never recognize Israel and will never abandon the resistance,” and that

resistance is the only road map that can save Jerusalem, restore the Arab honor, and prevent Palestine from becoming a second Andalusia

Two of the Jordanian participants in the flotilla, according to MEMRI, were Wael Al-Saka, a Muslim Brotherhood member, and Salam Al-Falahat, who was general guide of the Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan from 2006 to 2008. In an interview last year, Al-Falahat said:

We in the Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan see Palestine as part of the Islamic and Arab land that must not be relinquished…We see Hamas movement in Palestine as standing at the head of the project of the Arab and Islamic liberation for which the Muslim Brotherhood calls… The Muslim Brotherhood supports Hamas and every Arab resistance movement in the region that works for liberation

Unfortunately, Israel fell for the bait set by the Free Gaza Movement and its Islamic jidhadist allies, providing fodder to its enemies to use at the UN in further isolating Israel from the international community. The Obama administration acceded to the wishes of the Islamic representatives on the Security Council, Lebanon and Turkey, to zero in on Israel in return for some minor tweaking of tone.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton repeated a term used in the UN Security Council Presidential Statement to describe the present situation in Gaza – “unsustainable.” She focused her criticism on Israel, calling for it to permit the entry into Gaza of “reconstruction and building supplies” without any apparent regard for how such supplies could be used.

The situation in Gaza is unsustainable, but not for the reasons put forth by the UN, or by the Obama administration for that matter. The situation in Gaza is unsustainable as long as the terrorist organization Hamas controls the territory on Israel’s border and continues its campaign to destroy Israel.

Israel cannot give up the blockade without any means of assuring that Hamas will not build up its arms supplies to the level achieved by Hezbollah with the aid of its patrons in Iran. Surely, UN guarantees have proven not to be worth the paper they are written on.

Under pressure from the Islamic states that the Obama administration is courting, as well as from the anti-Israel chorus in the European Union, I am afraid that the next step for the Obama administration will be to line up against the continuation of the Gaza blockade and to abandon Israel in its fight against the Islamic terrorists bent on destroying the Jewish state.

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