From the Times of Israel:
In an op-ed published Friday, Kulanu Knesset member and former Israeli ambassador to the United States Michael Oren speculates that President Barack Obama’s relentless outreach to the Muslim world may stem from the fact that he was abandoned by the two Muslim father figures in his life and therefore seeks acceptance by their co-religionists.
In the article, in Foreign Policy Magazine, Oren also posits that the world may look back on Obama’s approach to Middle East issues as naive and hard to credit. The piece marks Oren’s third op-ed critical of Obama published in major US media in less than a week.
In the first of the series, the former ambassador published “How Obama abandoned Israel” in the Wall Street Journal, followed by “Why Obama is wrong about Iran being ‘rational’ on nukes,” in the Los Angeles Times.
He also gave a lengthy interview to the Times of Israel this week in which he echoed charges in his new book, “Ally,” to the effect that aspects of US-Israel ties are “in tatters” because of the president.
The Obama administration responded bitterly to Oren’s earlier criticism of the president, calling it “absolutely false.” His opposite number, US Ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro, said Oren was motivated by a desire to sell books.
But while freshman MK Oren’s party leader Moshe Kahlon on Wednesday apologized and distanced the party from the Wall Street Journal piece, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reportedly refused a US request to do likewise.GO READ THE WHOLE THING.
The old saying...."it takes one to know one"...seems most fitting given Oren's admission of assisting the enemy . . .what follows is a transcript from a radio program titled “How Israel handles itself in the Middle East is a challenge to Jewish morality, says renowned historian Professor Michael B Oren”. . . .
ReplyDelete“Ariel Sharon decided two years ago that Israel must
withdraw from the Gaza Strip, and so in the summer of 2005 I donned my uniform again as a reservist and participated in the operation to remove 21 Israeli settlements from the Gaza Strip and 8100 inhabitants. Those residents regarded Gaza as the Jew’s god-given patrimony, a gift which no government had the right to reject, and then the question arose, could this rift be spanned? Could Israel survive it? I was not sure.
On the morning I walked into the first of those settlements, with 500
Israeli soldiers, and the settlers set fire to the gate on fire so that
we had to wait until an armoured bulldozer came and broke it down. We
poured into the settlement and the residents pelted us with sacks of
paint and assailed us wearing the yellow star of the ghetto, calling us
Nazis. The settlers then barricaded themselves into the synagogue and
would not come out, and finally the commander of my unit reached an
agreement with the rabbi of the settlement that they would pray the
afternoon prayer and then they would come out, and line up and go on
buses. But they did not come out. That poor commander had to make the
difficult decision any Jewish officer could make: to break into the
synagogue with a sledgehammer. So we broke into that synagogue with a
sledgehammer, and what greeted us in there was the most difficult scene
I’ve ever encountered in my thirty years of army service. There were 100
Jews lying on the floor, wailing and screaming, clutching Torah
scrolls, clutching pews, crying out for God to save them. And some of
these Israeli officers, many of who were pilots and commando, fell as if
they’d been hit by bullets. And for a while there we weren’t sure who
was evacuating whom as some of the settlers came to help the soldiers
who had been stricken and fell down. And it took hours to literally tear
these people away from these Torah scrolls and physically to carry them
on to buses. And I was not sure that we could survive this as a people, as a state.”
Such is the moral compass of Michael Oren.
Surrender of Gaza should never have been characterized as land for peace. No one on the other side ever offered peace. Jewish history should be enough to teach never to surrender territory, think Golan and IS/ISIS/iSIL/Daesh. The violent bloodshed against Jewish Gaza residents was horrific, if not deadly during the final expulsion. Orens description above is sterilized of the violence commited against fellow JEws.