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The Daily Signal
Obama
Administration Courts Iran While Slapping Israel
James Phillips
March 20, 2015
As the Obama administration mounts a final diplomatic push to secure a
nuclear agreement with Iran, bilateral Israeli-American relations
continue to deteriorate.
This week Secretary of State John Kerry joined Iranian Foreign Minister
Javad Zarif in Lausanne, Switzerland for an intensive round of
negotiations ahead of the March 31 deadline for a framework agreement
on the Iranian nuclear issue.
The administration has bent over backwards to ingratiate itself with
Iran’s dictatorship in a misguided effort to coax a rapprochement out
of Tehran’s diehard Islamist revolutionaries.
The administration has held out the prospect of cooperating with Iran
against the terrorist threat posed by the Islamic State and downplayed
Iran’s support for terrorism.
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The most recent worldwide threat assessment by James Clapper, the
director of National Intelligence, went so far as to omit Iran from the
section on terrorist threats, despite the fact that Iran remains the
world’s foremost state-sponsor of terrorism.
The administration also has gone out of its way to defend Iran against
charges that it already has cheated on the interim nuclear
agreement. It excused Iranian testing of an advanced centrifuge
as an “error” by a low-level Iranian scientist who did not understand
the limits placed on experimentation.
Such eagerness to give Iran the benefit of the doubt has stoked
nervousness among U.S. allies in the Middle East, who fear that an
Iranian-American détente will come at their expense.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has been the most vocal
critic of the pending nuclear deal with Iran, has triggered the ire of
the White House and been the target of public rebukes and anonymous
sniping by administration officials.
White House spokesman Josh Earnest on Wednesday went out of his way to
criticize Netanyahu for his campaign rhetoric, which included appealing
for potential supporters to vote for his Likud Party to offset the
expected votes of “droves” of Israeli Arabs, who had formed a joint
list with Israel’s Communist Party.
White House officials also suggested that Netanyahu’s newly-declared
opposition to a Palestinian state could jeopardize American support for
Israel at the United Nations, where Washington historically has blocked
one-sided Security Council resolutions hostile to Israel.
Such a spiteful response would boost Palestinian efforts to
delegitimize and isolate Israel, while encouraging Palestinians to
continue their efforts to do an end run around Israel by shunning
negotiations in favor of pursuing the mirage of unilateral statehood
through the United Nations.
Netanyahu walked back his opposition to a Palestinian state on
Thursday, when he stated: “I don’t want a one-state solution. I want a
sustainable, peaceful two-state solution.”
But the Obama administration, which itself has an acrobatic record for
flip-flops on Middle East issues, including how to address the fighting
in Syria, Iraq and Libya, remains unforgiving of the prime minister’s
campaign rhetoric.
It is outrageous that the Obama administration can’t seem to give
Netanyahu the same benefit of the doubt that it gives to Iran’s hostile
regime, which has a long history of cheating on its nuclear
commitments, calling for destruction of Israel and the United States,
and supporting terrorism against Americans.
Read this and other articles at The Daily Signal
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