Under Mr. Obama, friends are enemies, denial is wisdom,
capitulation is victory.
The humiliating denouement to America’s involvement in
Yemen came over the weekend, when U.S. Special Forces were forced to evacuate a
base from which they had operated against the local branch of al Qaeda. This is
the same branch that claimed responsibility for the January attack on Charlie
Hebdo and has long been considered to pose the most direct threat to Europe and
the United States.
There is
an upside-down quality to this president’s world view. His administration is
now on better terms with Iran—whose Houthi proxies, with the slogan “God is
great, death to America, death to Israel, damn the Jews, power to Islam,” just
deposed Yemen’s legitimate president—than it is with Israel. He claims we are
winning the war against Islamic State even as the group continues to extend its
reach into Libya, Yemen and Nigeria.
He treats
Republicans in the Senate as an enemy when it comes to the Iranian nuclear
negotiations, while treating the Russian foreign ministry as a diplomatic
partner. He favors the moral legitimacy of the United Nations Security Council
to that of the U.S. Congress. He is facilitating Bashar
Assad’s war on his own people by targeting ISIS so the Syrian dictator can
train his fire on our ostensible allies in the Free Syrian Army.
He was
prepared to embrace a Muslim Brother as president of Egypt but maintains an
arm’s-length relationship with his popular pro-American successor. He has no
problem keeping company with Al Sharpton and tagging an American police
department as comprehensively racist but is nothing if not adamant that the
words “Islamic” and “terrorism” must on no account ever be conjoined. The
deeper that Russian forces advance into Ukraine, the more they violate
cease-fires, the weaker the Kiev government becomes, the more insistent he is
that his response to Russia is working.
To adapt George
Orwell’s motto for Oceania: Under Mr. Obama, friends are enemies, denial is
wisdom, capitulation is victory.
The
current victim of Mr. Obama’s moral inversions is the recently re-elected
Israeli prime minister. Normally a sweeping democratic mandate reflects
legitimacy, but not for Mr. Obama. Now we are treated to the astonishing
spectacle in which Benjamin
Netanyahu has
become persona non grata for his comments doubting the current feasibility of a
two-state solution. This, while his Palestinian counterpart Mahmoud
Abbas is
in the 11th year of his four-year term, without a murmur of protest from the
White House.
It is
true that Mr. Netanyahu made an ugly election-day remark about Israeli-Arab
voters “coming out in droves to the polls,” thereby putting “the right-wing
government in danger.” For this he has apologized, in person, to leaders of the
Israeli-Arab community.
That’s
more than can be said for Mr. Abbas, who last year threatened Israel with a
global religious war if Jews were allowed to pray in the Temple Mount’s Al Aqsa
mosque. “We will not allow our holy places to be contaminated,” the Palestinian
Authority president said. The Obama administration insists that Mr. Abbas is
“the best interlocutor Israel is ever going to have.”
Maybe
that’s true, but if so it only underscores the point Mr. Netanyahu was making
in the first place—and for which Mr. Obama now threatens a fundamental
reassessment of U.S. relations with Israel. In 2014 Mr. Abbas agreed to a
power-sharing agreement with Hamas, a deal breaker for any Israeli interested
in peace. In 2010 he used the expiration of a 10-month Israeli settlement
freeze as an excuse to abandon bilateral peace efforts. In 2008 he walked away
from a statehood offer from then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud
Olmert. In
2000 he was with Yasser
Arafat at
Camp David when the Palestinians turned down a deal from Israel’s Ehud
Barak.
And so on. For continuously rejecting good-faith Israeli
offers, Mr. Abbas may be about to get his wish: a U.S. vote for Palestinian
statehood at the United Nations. For tiring of constant Palestinian bad
faith—and noting the fact—Israel will now be treated to pariah-nation status by
Mr. Obama.
Here is
my advice to the Israeli government, along with every other country being
treated disdainfully by this crass administration: Repay
contempt with contempt. Mr. Obama plays to classic bully type. He is
abusive and surly only toward those he feels are either too weak, or too
polite, to hit back.
The
Saudis figured that out in 2013, after Mr. Obama failed to honor his promises
on Syria; they turned down a seat on the Security Council, spoke openly about
acquiring nuclear weapons from Pakistan and tanked the price of oil, mainly as
a weapon against Iran. Now Mr. Obama is nothing if not solicitous of the Saudi
highnesses.
The
Israelis will need to chart their own path of resistance. On the Iranian
nuclear deal, they may have to go rogue: Let’s hope their warnings have not
been mere bluffs. Israel survived its first 19 years without meaningful U.S.
patronage. For now, all it has to do is get through the next 22, admittedly
long, months.
Write to bstephens@wsj.com
Bret Stephens
forgot about Newspeak
The
purpose of Newspeak: To make all other modes of thought impossible.
We have finally reached the
point George Orwell warned us about in 1949 when his novel 1984 was published.
We cannot defend ourselves anymore because the official government vocabulary
has been stripped of the words to formulate the problem in the first place.
As Robert Spencer points out ,
“FBI had no idea how to tell whether or not
Tamerlan Tsarnaev was “engaging in extremist activity,” because the “extremist
activity” he was engaging in was Islamic jihad, and Obama’s FBI is forbidden to study
Islamic jihad. This is because
the Obama Administration in 2011 mandated the scrubbing of counter-terror
training materials of the truth about Islam and jihad.”
George Orwell “The purpose of Newspeak was not
only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits
proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once
and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought — that is, a thought diverging
from the principles of Ingsoc — should be literally unthinkable, at least so
far as thought is dependent on words.”