Obama Reveals His Feathers

Obama's Legacy on Israel - Elliott Abrams

Just weeks before leaving office, President Obama could not resist the opportunity to take one more swipe at Israel - and to do real harm.
   
Obama has done us one favor, which is to settle the long argument about his attitude toward Israel.
  
No partisan of his can henceforth say with a straight face, as Thomas Friedman wrote in the New York Times in 2012: "The only question I have when it comes to President Obama and Israel is whether he is the most pro-Israel president in history or just one of the most."     When the crunch came, Israelis had to turn to Egypt to try to postpone a UN vote.
  
Think about that: there is more trust between Israel and Egypt today than between either of them and the U.S.
(Weekly Standard)


New Zealand Is a Colonialist State Founded on the Theft of Maori Land
- Liel Leibovitz

New Zealand introduced the resolution in the UN Security Council that pronounced settlements to be illegal.
   
New Zealanders are no strangers to settlements. In 1831, there were fewer than 1,000 Europeans living in New Zealand among the local Maori tribes. These Europeans had neither historical attachment nor any legal claim to the land.
  
Eventually, Maori sovereignty in their ancestral homeland was effectively eliminated.
(Tablet) 


The Occupiers Who Voted Against Israel - Alan Dershowitz

Votes in favor of the anti-Israel UN resolution were cast by Russia, which has occupied Konigsberg since 1945, after capturing that ancient German city, ethnically cleansing its population, and bringing in hundreds of thousands of Russian settlers; China, which has occupied Tibet and brought in thousands of Chinese settlers; France, which occupied and settled Algeria for many years; and Great Britain, which has occupied and colonized a significant portion of the globe. 
(Gatestone Institute)


Egyptian Report Reveals Obama's Collaboration with Palestinian Authority in UN Ambush of Israel
- Yochanan Visser

Israel's Channel 1 broadcast a report quoting Egyptian media that published the secret protocol of a meeting between U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, National Security Adviser Susan Rice, and two top Palestinian Authority officials in Washington on Dec. 15. Oded Granot, an Arabic-speaking Middle East expert, said the protocol was iron-clad evidence that the procedure that led to the ambush against Israel in the Security Council on Friday was coordinated between Kerry, Rice, PA Chief Negotiator Saeb Erekat, and Ryad Mansour, the PA envoy to the United Nations.     

Kerry and Rice told the two PA officials that the Obama administration was ready to cooperate with a Palestinian action at the Security Council on condition that the resolution would be "balanced." Kerry also reportedly suggested to Erekat that the PA could bring up ideas to set the parameters for a forced permanent solution to the conflict.
   
Granot said the Egyptians most likely published the protocol to express their frustration with the attitude of the Obama administration in orchestrating the move behind the back of Egyptian President el-Sisi. 
(Western Journalism)


Video - Krauthammer: It's As If the UN Passed a Resolution Declaring Mecca Jewish Territory

Columnist Charles Krauthammer discussed the recent UN resolution on Fox News, saying, "Does anybody think that Venezuela and New Zealand spent nights slaving over the wording of this resolution? (They were the ones who introduced it.) Of course not. This was a U.S. operation all the way."
    
"The pernicious part is the inclusion in the resolution of the term 'east Jerusalem.' That was totally unnecessary, and it's completely illogical. It turns the holiest site in Judaism - the Temple Mount, the Western Wall - into foreign territory. People say, 'it's the third holiest shrine in Islam.' It's the first holiest shrine of Judaism. It's as if the UN passed a resolution declaring Mecca and Medina to be sovereign Jewish or Christian territory. It's absurd, it's an insult to the intelligence of the world, and it is supremely damaging to the Israeli claim to its own holy places." 
(National Review)


Why This UN Resolution Was Different - Jonathan S. Tobin 

While previous resolutions unfairly criticized the Jewish state, none of them specifically labeled the Jewish presence in territory Israel took control of in the 1967 Six-Day War as illegal. It means that hundreds of thousands of Jews living in decades-old Jewish neighborhoods in the city of Jerusalem or in settlement blocs that even Obama has conceded would remain inside Israel in the event of a peace treaty are now international outlaws.
  
It will put air in the sails of an anti-Semitic BDS (boycott, divest, sanction) movement that had seemed to be losing ground in recent years. Now, for the first time, it can claim to have the backing of the UN. Under the terms of this resolution, Jewish holy places in Jerusalem are considered to be Palestinian. This is an endorsement of the vicious Palestinian campaign at UNESCO and other UN bodies to deny Jewish history and religion by claiming Jerusalem's holy places are exclusively Muslim.
    
Moreover, it removes any incentive for the Palestinian Authority to budge from its refusal to negotiate peace with Israel. In effect, Obama, who has claimed to be a champion of the peace process, has effectively killed it. 
(Commentary)
*