Obama's folly

Obama's reckless offensive against America's best friend in the Middle East, Israel, as expressed in an editorial today in the New York Daily News:

The Obama administration has just finished - it is
hoped - an unfair, unwise and unconscionable
pummeling of Israel, of which no good will come.

The deliberately calibrated fury directed at the
Jewish state by Vice President Biden, Secretary of
State Clinton and top White House aide David
Axelrod since last week was grossly
disproportionate to Israel's perceived offense.

And what was that? As Biden visited, hoping to
advance tenuous peace talks, Israel's Interior
Ministry blindsided Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu by announcing plans to proceed with
plans for building, in a few years, 1,600 apartments
in East Jerusalem.

Setting aside the fact that the area is a Jewish
neighborhood, and the fact that Israel's eventual
sovereignty there has been taken for granted in
round after fruitless round of two-state
negotiations, the planning announcement was an
ill-timed gaffe that complicated Biden's mission.

Netanyahu was profuse in apology. No matter. The
vice president roared with moral outrage properly
reserved for terrorism and other heinous crimes.
Speaking more harshly than the administration does
to, say, Iran, he began with the two strongest words
possible: "I condemn."