By
Claudia Rosett
December 24, 2016
To President Obama's legacy of
foreign policy debacles, we can now add his landmark betrayal of Israel,
carried out Dec. 23rd at the United Nations. By declining to wield the
U.S. veto at the Security Council, by choosing instead to abstain -- by
Vanishing-from-Behind -- Obama allowed the passage, by a vote of 14 in
favor, 1 abstaining, of Resolution 2334.
In the guise of condemning Israeli settlements, this resolution is
configured to delegitimize and imperil Israel itself, America's longtime
ally and the only democracy in the Middle East.
With
that signal abstention, Obama abandoned decades of U.S. practice of
defending Israel against the bigots and thug governments that routinely
sit on the Security Council, including permanent members Russia and
China, and their rotating sidekicks, such as Venezuela. As a Wall Street Journal
editorial accurately put it, referring to the U.S. abstention: "What it
reveals clearly is the Obama administration's animus against the state
of Israel itself. No longer needing Jewish votes, Mr. Obama was free,
finally, to punish the Jewish state in a way no previous president has
done."
It is not only Israel
that Obama is punishing. It is America itself, and the voters who had
the audacity at the polls to choose, over Obama's heiress-designate, a
candidate who clearly stated his intention to restore American power,
and reverse Obama's policies of coddling enemies, such as Iran, and
snubbing allies, such as Israel. President-elect Donald Trump urged
Obama to veto this resolution. Obama, with less than four weeks left in
office, instead took time out from his Hawaiian holiday to order that
the U.S. -- to borrow one of the notorious phrases from the 2012 debacle
in Benghazi -- stand down.
Then,
in a series of scenes that could have been scripted by George Orwell,
Obama's senior functionaries blurred, fudged or outright lied about what
his administration had just done. ...
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