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Sunday, September 27, 2009

Netanyahu said what Obama should have.

FORGET the blather, there were only two im portant speeches at the United Na tions last week. One was a stirring wake-up call about the evil brewing in Iran.
Barack Obama gave the other speech. It saw no evil.
It fell to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to be the truth-teller. Brandishing Nazi blueprints for Auschwitz and charging the UN with "shame" for giving Iran's madman leader a forum for his hate, Netanyahu said what Obama should have.
Our president whiffed, punted, failed, struck out. His turn at the microphone was important for the worst of reasons: It marked the official coming-out party for a policy of abdicating America's role as protector of the free world.
Obama revealed his self-reverential fixation on "global cooperation," a willowy hope that implicitly gives every crackpot dictator a veto over American assertions of national interest. The terrifying prospect that Obama is prepared to voluntarily forfeit America's preeminence has only suggested itself before, including in Cairo last June, when his flawed moral-equivalence calculations emerged.
"No single nation should pick and choose which nation holds nuclear weapons," he told his Muslim audience then. Never mind that a year earlier, as a candidate, he had told a Jewish audience he would "do everything in my power to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, everything."
It was not until he took the UN stage that Obama's kumbaya dreams were illuminated in their frightening totality. Even Friday, after Iran conceded it has secretly enriched uranium at a second site, Obama could muster no more outrage than a scolding about "international law," as though that means anything to repressive theocracies.
He also used his first speech to the General Assembly to repeat his moral-equivalency nonsense.
"America does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements," he said while demanding that Palestinians end their "incitement of Israel."
Even if the policy has any merit, it was the wrong place. By rebuking Israel before the General Assembly -- a body that for 16 years, until 1991, formally equated Zionism with racism -- Obama drew applause from an audience that included Holocaust denier Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. (continues here)

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