Monday night I attended an insightful presentation entitled
“Israel on the Eve of the U.S. Elections,” given by Caroline Glick for the Los
Angeles-based organization Children of Jewish
Holocaust Survivors.
Glick is the Senior Contributing Editor of The Jerusalem Post and adjunct senior
fellow for Middle Eastern Affairs at the Center for Security Policy in
Washington D.C. The author of Shackled
Warrior: Israel and the Global Jihad, she served as Assistant
Foreign Policy Advisor to Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu in 1997-98, and regularly
briefs administration officials and Congress on issues of joint
American-Israeli concern. She also recently was
appointed as the Director for the Israel Security Project at the David
Horowitz Freedom Center.
Glick began her presentation with her perspective on
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s recent visit to Jerusalem. It was
very, very well-received, she said; in fact, he was “a breath of fresh air” – not
because he made a candidate’s usual extravagant promises of support for Israel,
but because “he lives in the real world,” where we acknowledge that the Middle
East is extremely dangerous and the radiant “Arab Spring” is actually a much
bleaker Islamic Winter.
Romney endeared himself to the Israelis simply because he
acknowledged basic truths about Israel and the Middle East: “The irony of the
topsy-turvy times in which we live is that stating the obvious – such as the
fact that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel – is enough to get you a standing
ovation.”
By contrast, in Obama’s “fantasy world,” the reason jihad is
rampant is that the United States has treated the Arab world poorly,
and if the United States turns on
its allies and even on its own interests, and apologizes to its worst enemy,
which is what [Obama] did on June 4, 2009 in his speech in Cairo, then somehow
or another things are going to get better – that is, by being bad to yourself,
by weakening your allies and empowering your worst enemy, you’re going to turn
your enemy into your friend.
Glick pointed out that the Obama administration brought down
the Mubarak regime in Egypt, our certainly imperfect but most important ally in
the region, and one which had kept the peace for 30 years with Israel. Now the
Muslim Brotherhood is in control. “What we have today in Egypt is a sea change
on the magnitude of the Communist Revolution in China,” said Glick. After China
turned Red, she said, “America was obsessed with the question, ‘Who lost China?’
Today, there’s no question that America lost Egypt, but our government doesn’t
seem to realize the problem with that.”
After commenting on unsettling developments regarding the
Egyptian military, Glick turned to the issue of Iran. The Obama administration has
focused not on preventing Iran from developing nuclear weapons, but on
preventing Israel from acting military to stop Iran’s openly genocidal nuclear
program. Sanctions have not diminished Iran’s ability one iota, largely because
20 countries have been exempted by the Obama administration from participating
in the sanctions. So Iran simply continues on its apocalyptic path unabated.
“We’re living in a very disturbing world,” Glick pointed
out, “and unfortunately that world is being led down the garden path by an
American government that is insisting on preventing people from seeing reality.”
The Obama administration has purged the government vocabulary, for example, of
“all the terms required to describe the reality” of our conflict with Islamic
fundamentalism: “jihad,” “Islamic terrorism,” etc.
She condemned “J Street,” the Jewish lobby, for proclaiming
politicians who don’t support a two-state solution to be “anti-Israel.” The
two-state solution, Glick says, is “nothing but a recipe for war,” and this
time, “the scale of war will be on a much greater dimension than in the past.”
We have to look at other options for peace.
When asked about the threat from Turkey, Glick said it’s a
very dangerous country partly because it’s a member of NATO and has the power
to influence that body to move away from protecting Israel. This is something
NATO never contemplated having to contend with – a scenario in which a NATO
member is actually a potential enemy. Turkey also influenced the United States
not to include Israel in a recent international counterterrorism conference. Turkey’s
Prime Minister Recep Erdogan is “a Jew-hater” and “America-hater,” and yet
Obama openly describes him as one of the world leaders whom he confides in most
often and whose friendship he cherishes:
This is a disturbing thing because
under Erdogan, the Turkish media, which has become a surrogate for the
government, and the Turkish entertainment industry have become virulently
anti-American, virulently anti-Israel, virulently anti-Semitic. Nobody likes to
talk about these things, but this is a country that has put out popular
television series, bestselling books, movies where Americans and Israeli Jews
are portrayed as… just diabolical monsters. And nobody in the Obama
administration seems to think that this should impact the way that America
looks at the Turkish government.
It’s very important to realize, Glick closed by saying, that
Israel is “privileged that we have the ability to take up arms to defend
ourselves. After five hundred generations in which Jews did not have the
ability to defend ourselves, we are living in a time when we do.”
(This article originally appeared here on FrontPage Mag, 8/2/12)
