The Moral Consequences of Obama's Surrender to Tyranny

Zionist commentators on the Obama’s speech on May 19th have recognized the reality that this speech reflects a dramatic paradigm shift in U.S. policy toward Israel and the PLO. For the first time in recent memory, the U.S. President is openly siding with the PLO on many bedrock issues in the PLO’s ongoing war with Israel and the Jews. Obama is requiring the Jews to return to the pre-1967 armstice lines which the late Israeli diplomat Abba Eban referred to as the “Auschwitz lines”. He is not rejecting outright the outrageous idea of Israel negotiating with a PLO regime that now contains the hostile PLO element along with the mortally hostile Hamas regime.

He seems eager to return to a time when Jerusalem was divided by barbed wire and the Jews had no access to the holiest Jewish shrine: the Western Wall or Kotel in Jerusalem. He also seems eager to return to a time when the Egyptians and Jordanians sent terrorists across the border into Israel to kill Jewish civilians, when Arab terrorists fired down from the high ground of the Jordanian-controlled West Bank to the lower ground of Israel.  He would also want to return to a time when Syrian forces fired down from the Golan Heights onto Jewish farmers in northern Israel.  Obama has made it perfectly clear that he is ready to sacrifice Israel’s security for the sake of appeasing Arab and Muslim tyrants throughout the Middle East.

Unfortunately, his willingness to endanger the security of Israel, the only Middle Eastern country with a long-term democratic history, seems to reflect a broader policy of supporting oppression and opposing freedom in the Middle East region. The post-Mubarak military regime in Egypt is moving toward a much more openly anti-Israel and anti-Jewish policy than even the Mubarak regime itself in many respects.  The Mubarak regime preached open and vicious hatred of Israel and the Jews in its media and especially its school system. However, the post-Mubarak regime has turned away even more from cooperation with Israel and the Jews than the Mubarak regime. First, the Egyptians have opened up the border between Egypt and Hamas-controlled Gaza, thus breaking with the Israeli blockade on Gaza. Second, the Egyptians allowed two Iranian warships to pass through the Suez Canal for the first time since the Islamic revolution in Iran in 1979. In addition, the regime is also tolerating openly violent demonstrations outside the Israeli embassy in Cairo which feature calls to end the peace treaty between Israel and Egypt. The regime has not gone to the formal extreme of ending diplomatic relations or the peace treaty with Israel, but the regime’s trend is clearly an overtly anti-Israel and anti-Jewish one in both words and deeds.

In this post, http://iraqthemodel.blogspot.com/2011/05/through-decades-we-saw-protesters.html, my friend Mohammed Fadhil the Iraqi democratic blogger notes the profound moral difference between Arab demonstrators who historically burned Israeli and American flags and the Syrian protestors who recently burned the Russian and Iranian flags. The Syrian protestors also wrote a message to Russian President Dmitri Medvedev in Russian and Arabic saying that the Syrian people want freedom. Syrians also burned a Hezbollah flag as well. In March, the protestors in Da’ara chanted slogans against Iran and Hezbollah, as did protestors in Latakia in April. The Syrian people are rejecting the tyrants’ efforts to blame outsiders such as the West and the Jews for their misery and oppression. Instead, the Syrian people are saying that their enemy is tyranny as represented by the Iranian and Russian regimes and Hezbollah.

Unfortunately, by offering Assad yet another chance to “reform” instead of simply calling for regime change, Obama is inadvertently playing directly into Assad’s hands. Obama’s message to Syria is that he is sitting on the fence between Assad and his victims. Obama conveys the unfortunate impression that he is unsure whether he would prefer to see the forces of totalitarian oppression and anti-Semitism or the forces of democracy and freedom win in Syria. At a time when the Syrian people are risking their lives to expel Iran and Hezbollah from their country, Obama is not supporting them.

Having failed to call for regime change in Iran and support the Iranian people’s freedom goals in 2009, today he is failing to support the Syrian people’s yearning for freedom and democracy. He seems more intent on appeasing anti-Jewish regimes in Damascus and Tehran than in supporting the liberation of the Syrian and Iranian people from totalitarian oppression. He seems to be utterly unconcerned and indifferent to the Iranian regime’s persistent calls to destroy Israel and the Jews and its systematic Holocaust denial, and he doesn’t seem to care about the right of the Iranian people to live in dignity and freedom. His failure to call for regime change in either Damascus or Tehran offers aid and comfort to the enemies of Israel and the Jews –and the enemies of freedom throughout the Middle East.