Crossing a Red Line?

Today, breaking from his tradition of remaining above the fray, Barack Obama called Israeli Prime Minister, Bibi Netanyahu and demanded an "immediate ceasefire"—in essence, intervening to allow Hamas to not only survive, but to rearm, build more attack tunnels, and continue a steady stream of rockets on Israeli population centers at some future date.

John Podhoretz first suggests that Obama is being disingenuous, demanding something that he knows Israel cannot accept, but allowing himself to look like an advocate of "peace" for his leftist supporters (who themselves despise Israel and everything it stands for).

I have contended since before his election in 2008 that Barack Obama is no friend of Israel. He has demonstrated this in his passive-aggressive actions throughout the years.

But then, Podhoretz suggests a far more sinister alternative. He writes:

But it’s also very possible the president isn’t being disingenuous. In which case he has really crossed a—do I dare—red line here no other American leader ever has. Obama doesn’t like the pictures he’s seeing, he doesn’t like Bibi, he doesn’t like the fact that even Israel’s liberals are in a belligerent frame of mind after weeks of missile attacks against population centers, he isn’t running for reelection, he doesn’t care about donors or Jewish voters, he believes in his heart of hearts that the root cause of regional instability is Israel’s gains in the 1967 war, and in service of all these feelings and beliefs, he’s decided Israel is in the wrong and that Hamas needs to be saved from Israel’s might. In which case, he is personally intervening against an American ally with a legitimately elected and deeply fractious coalition government on behalf of a terrorist organization.

No one can know what is in Obama's head, but every American Jew (and every American who believes that the Middles East's only liberal democracy has a right to exist) should watch this president's moves very carefully in the coming days.