From The Jerusalem Watchman

Obama engages the Middle East Posted on Tuesday 27 January 2009

Barely in office, America’s brand new president and his secretary of state are already moving fast to position themselves on the so-called Israeli-”Palestinian” conflict.

Shining like new pennies, bolstered by the massive national wave of feel-good optimism, they stood in front of the television cameras last Thursday and drew up their battle plans, declaring their intentions and appointing the man who will spearhead their efforts to realize success on the ground.

“I pledge my supreme effort,” Barack Hussein Obama declared, “in the search for peace and a stability in the Middle East.”

We will - said Hillary Rodham Clinton as she introduced new envoy George Mitchell - be adopting a “robust” approach.

Mitchell is due in Jerusalem tomorrow. It looks like Obama is already moving to engage the enemy here.

Who, one might ask, is that enemy?

To best answer, let’s identify America’s “friends.”

Obama’s first telephone call from the Oval Office last Wednesday, the day after his inauguration, was to Palestine Liberation Organization chairman Mahmoud Abbas. The president promised the terrorist-in-a-tie that his new administration would be pushing ahead towards the “two-state-solution.”

Obama also saw to it Tuesday that his first television interview was addressed to the Arab-Islamic world. “Americans are not your enemies,” he told Al-Arabiya TV.

“We sometimes make mistakes — we have not been perfect.”

Muslims attacked America on 9-11. Muslims have been triggering and waging war all around the globe, often aimed at America’s interests, but the US president tells Muslims AMERICA has made mistakes!?

Who, WHO is the enemy in Obama and Clinton’s eyes?

Is it the Arab world, that for decades has ganged up on Israel and asserted effort after effort to destroy the state which has 950-times less land than the Arabs do?

Is it the Arab regimes of Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt, whose rejection of the Jews’ right to their homeland has been the primary factor responsible for the instability in the Middle East that has so detrimentally affected the interests of the United States and the rest of the western world?

Is it the countries which, endowed with stupendous wealth, threaten - and sometimes make good on their threat - to hold the oil-reliant nations hostage unless they dance to their Arab tune?

Is it the vicious abusers of human and women’s rights, who torture their opponents in medieval dungeons, forbid - on pain of death - the personal choice of their people to convert from Islam to Christianity - or to sell their land to a Jew; and condemn their own citizens to live in poverty while they spend billions of dollars pursuing more advanced weapons with which to attack Israel?

Is it the opportunistic despots who traditionally have chosen to side with America’s foes and only - transparently - agreed to become America’s “allies” when other options have been closed to them and/or in exchange for the goodies such an alliance can bring?

Is it the people who break out in singing and hand out candy to celebrate jihadist attacks on the United States and the murdering of thousands of American citizens; the people who burn the Stars and Stripes and trample the ashes into the dirt while spewing out their hatred for the Great Satan; the people who make an instant hero out of a “journalist” who flings his shoes at the president of the despised and abhorred United States?

Are these countries the enemy?

Or is the Obama administration - not withstanding its repeated pledges of friendship and fealty to Israel’s security - soon to discover that it is Israel who will get in the way of its policies, program and “peace” plan for the Middle East?

Will the bad boy on the block for America quickly become the small state under its proud Star of David, surrounded by belligerent and bullying regimes who have steeped their people in antisemitism and for decades promised them, day-after-day, the spoils that will be theirs when they have finally vanquished the Jew?

Will the enemy be the only Middle Eastern nation that shares America’s values of democracy, freedom of the press and respect for human rights?

Will the - eventual if not immediate - enemy be the nation whose forefathers gave America the Bible on which their legal system and a great deal of their national history and values have been built?

Will the enemy be the remnant of a nation which, against all imaginable odds, managed to survive centuries of assorted and often terribly effective efforts to annihilate them simply because of who they are as a nation and Who they represent?

Will the Obama administration’s enemy be this little land whose people look, almost fawningly, to the US for friendship, swearing allegiance to the American flag in almost the same breath with which they swear allegiance to their own?

America, under its new liberal leaders, will soon begin to turn the screws on Jerusalem.

It’s going to happen.

Mark my words.