In an interview with Britain’s Sky News over the weekend, US President Barack Obama was asked whether he is planning to accept Syrian President Bashar Assad’s invitation to visit Damascus. The very fact that an American presidential visit to the Syrian capital is on the international agenda demonstrates how radically US foreign policy has shifted.     Four years ago,…

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had reason to feel good about himself this week. Less than a month after he secured his hold on power for another four years by rigging the presidential elections, Ahmadinejad felt comfortable addressing his subjugated nation as its rightful dictator. So in a chilling televised performance on Tuesday, he triumphantly declared the stolen June 12 poll…

It works out that US President Barack Obama is a man of heartfelt, long-held principles. It also works out that his principles are divorced from reality and unresponsive to any facts that contradict them.     This much was made clear by a New York Times report on Sunday which discussed a recently “rediscovered” 1983 article Obama published in a…

It works out that retired Supreme Court president Aharon Barak – the man who shaped Israel’s judiciary in his own image – doesn’t care much for Jews.     In a speech last Thursday sponsored by the post-Zionist New Israel Fund, Barak said, “If you ask a Jew whether he supports equality with the Arabs, he will say: ‘Certainly.’ And…

For a brief moment it seemed that US President Barack Obama was moved by the recent events in Iran. On Friday, he issued his harshest statement yet on the mullocracy’s barbaric clampdown against its brave citizens who dared to demand freedom in the aftermath of June 12’s stolen presidential elections.     Speaking of the protesters Obama said, “Their bravery…

US President Barack Obama consistently couches his demand that Israel prohibit Jewish people from constructing or expanding our homes and communities in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria in legal-sounding language.     Obama has called settlements “illegitimate.” And he has said that Israel “has obligations under the road map,” while referring disparagingly to “settlements that, in past agreements, have been categorized…

Have American Jews abandoned Israel in favor of President Obama? This is a central question in the minds of Israelis today.     In a poll of Israeli Jews conducted in mid-June by the Jerusalem Post, a mere 6 percent of respondents said they view Obama as pro-Israel. In stark contrast, a Gallup tracking poll in early May showed that…

“Could there be something to all the talk of an Obama effect, after all? A stealth effect, perhaps?”       So asked Helene Cooper, the New York Times‘ diplomatic correspondent in a news analysis of the massive anti-regime protests in Iran published in Sunday’s Times.       It took US President Barack Obama eight days to issue a…

Israel finds itself in unfamiliar territory today. The revolutionary atmosphere building in Iran presents Israel with a prospect it has rarely confronted: a safe bet. With the Obama administration refusing to back the anti-regime protesters, and the European Union similarly hemming and hawing, millions of Iranians who are on the streets, risking their lives to protest a stolen election and…

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s speech Sunday evening at Bar-Ilan University had one goal: To get US President Barack Obama off of Israel’s back.     Netanyahu’s speech was an eloquent, rational and at times impassioned defense of Israel. For Israeli ears, after years of former prime minister Ehud Olmert’s and former foreign minister Tzipi Livni’s continuous assaults on Israeli rights,…