Throwing Israel Under The Bus Is Simply Un-American

(Fred Weinberg/The Penny Press) – So, Barack Obama is going to bring an end to the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Well, he’s certainly not going to be successful by continuing his attempt at bludgeoning Israel into submission.  Watching Benjamin Netanyahu take Obama to school last week was like watching LeBron James play a high school basketball team.

And, frankly, it’s pretty hard to take a President’s resolve seriously when he tosses Israel under the bus on Thursday and then tells the American Israel Public Affairs Committee on Sunday that the bonds between the United States and Israel are unbreakable.  It’s a lot like saying that some of my best friends are Jewish.  Or Black.

With a surname like Weinberg, I suppose it could be said that I have a bias.  Yes, I do.

I tend to be biased against people who openly advocate wiping a nation off the face of the earth.  That is the stated position of both Hamas and Hezbollah who are actually in control of the Palestinian governmental apparatus, such as it is.

Barack Hussein Obama was not quite six years old when Syria and Egypt moved troops into position on Israel’s border and conned Jordan into joining them.  Israel, at the time, was just nine miles wide at its most narrow point and a very attractive target for Arabs with a stated intention of pushing it into the sea.

Lest anyone forget, Egyptian dictator Gamel Abdul Nasser told the world on May 27, 1967: “Our basic objective will be the destruction of Israel. The Arab people want to fight.”  The following day, he added: “We will not accept any coexistence with Israel. Today the issue is not the establishment of peace between the Arab states and Israel. The war with Israel is in effect since 1948.”

By June 5, Israel was also the victim of Egypt blockading the Straits of Tiran near the Southern-most point of Israel, cutting off the Jewish state’s access to Asia supply routes and oil.

So, on June 5, the Israeli Air Force took off at 7:14 a.m. and destroyed the Egyptian Air Force—300 Soviet supplied MiGs—on the ground while the Egyptians were having breakfast.  Their tanks then fought one of the most brilliant tank campaigns in history, totally destroying the Egyptian tank force.

All of that took three days, during which Syria was shelling Israel from the Golan Heights.  So as their next objective, the Israelis took out the artillery emplacements and captured the Golan Heights from Syria.

Finally, they took Jerusalem from the Jordanians who had shelled the sacred city.

It all took seven days.  In the United States, new cadets went to West Point hoping to some day emulate Israeli General Moshe Dayan, who had been appointed Defense Minister right before the war.

Today, Obama, who was either living in Indonesia or moving there during the war, and, apparently, has no grasp of history, wants Israel to give back the Golan Heights. And all the other territory it captured 44 years ago. What’s next?  Maybe we’ll give Arizona to Mexico because this President doesn’t wish to control those borders?  La Raza would love that as much as Hezbollah would enjoy seeing Israel give back the Golan Heights.

Let me put this in perspective.  Would you willingly live in Elko, Nevada, if a hostile nation, say, California, could put artillery emplacements on the Ruby Mountains and shell the city at will?  The heights and distances are about the same.

Do you think that United States should give back Texas?  (Obama probably does, but that’s a political calculation.)  

I was a sophomore in high school during that time frame.  My career in journalism had just started.  I remember those seven days vividly.  Just as I do the Cuban missile crisis some years earlier.

We didn’t have an internet back then, or 24-hour news channels, or even always-on station satellites to bring us instant news.  News came from NBC, ABC and CBS, it was filmed and flown across the ocean and took as much as 24 hours to put on the air. The closest we came to instant news was radio, and we were glued to the radio—Mutual and NBC Monitor—for word of the war.

My father sold Israeli bonds back then to members of our Temple to help the nation fund its defense.

There was no question then and there is no question now of which nation was right and which nation was wrong.

For whatever reason, many Jews gave Obama a pass and voted for him in the last election.  Now that his true attitude towards Israel is crystal clear, maybe some of my brethren will come to their senses and the 2012 numbers won’t be a lopsided 78% to 22%.  If that’s the case, Florida is gone for Obama and that could be a political game changer.

This is really a simple choice: Do we want to back a nation that has consistently been our friend and is a bastion of Democracy in a place in the world where brutal dictatorships run every other government?  Think Pakistan, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Syria and, of course, Iran.  Real democracies.

Or, do we want to back the dictators? And, remember, dictators only respect and understand brute force.

Don’t talk to me about 1967 borders.  How about we just do what’s necessary to back our friend?