To the naked eye, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan seems to be moving from strength to strength. Erdogan was welcomed as a hero on his recent trip to Egypt, Tunisia and Libya. The Arabs embraced him as the new face of the war against Israel. The Obama administration celebrates Turkey as a paragon of Islamic democracy. The Obama administration cannot…
Last month at the UN President Barack Obama did something he had never done before. He discussed Israel and the Palestinians without once attacking Israel. He didn’t blame Israel for the absence of peace. True, Obama did not blame the Palestinians for refusing to negotiate with Israel. He did not attack Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas for making a…
Upon his return to Ramallah from New York, Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas was greeted by a crowd of several thousand well-wishers. They applauded him for his speech at the UN. There, Abbas erased Jewish history from the Land of Israel, denied Israel’s right to exist and pledged his commitment to establish a racist Palestinian state ethnically cleansed of all…
I posted the following last night at NRO’s blog The Corner: This week’s Palestinian-statehood extravaganza at the U.N. is being billed as something of a modern-day showdown at the O.K. Corral. If the Palestinians gain recognition of their state, then Israel is the big loser. And if the Palestinians fail to gain U.N. recognition of “Palestine” as a member…
There is something surreal about the coverage of developments this week at the UN. The general tenor is akin to the showdown at the OK Corral. Either the Palestinians win recognition of statehood, or they don’t. If they do, they win. If they don’t, Israel wins. The problem with this message is that even if the Palestinians don’t receive…
Speaking Sunday at the UN’s conference of donors to the Palestinian Authority, Deputy Foreign Minister Daniel Ayalon warned that while Israel supports economic assistance to the PA now, that is liable to change within the week. As he put it, “Future assistance and cooperation could be severely and irreparably compromised if the Palestinian leadership continues on its path of…
If nothing else, the Palestinians’ UN statehood gambit goes a long way towards revealing the deep-seated European and US pathologies that enable and prolong the Palestinian conflict with Israel. In a nutshell, the Palestinian Authority – or Fatah – or PLO initiative of asking the UN Security Council and the General Assembly to upgrade its status to that of…
We are able to consider the lessons of the weekend’s mob assault on the Israeli embassy in Cairo because the six Israeli security officers who were on the brink of being slaughtered were rescued at the last moment and spirited out of the country. If the Egyptian commandos hadn’t arrived on the scene at the last moment, the situation would…
Ten years ago, in the shadow of the crater at Ground Zero, the smoldering Pentagon and a field of honor in Pennsylvania, America found itself at war. Today, a decade on, America is still at war. Ten years after the September 11, 2001, attacks, the time has come to assess the progress of America’s war. But to assess…
US election season is clearly upon us as US President Barack Obama has moved into full campaign mode. Part and parcel of that mode is a new bid to woo Jewish voters and donors upset by Obama’s hostility to Israel back in the Democratic Party’s fold. To undertake this task, the White House turned to its reliable defender, columnist…