Silver Lining

Caroline Glick is one of the world's most respected journalists when it come to Middle East reporting. She exhibits a comprehensive understanding of the region, but rather than pontificating on it (a la Tom Friedman), she digs and digs, fact-finding until she builds an irrefutable case to support her reporting. She presents hard information that other Western reporters are either unwilling or unable to gather. She is a staunch defender of Israel.

Over the past month, Barack Obama has implied that Israel is the only Middle Eastern county (check that, the only country on the planet) that is against the Iran nuclear "deal." John Kerry, a pre-eminent member of Obama's Team of 2s, parrots that implication as well. In a previous post, I noted that the manner in which Obama and Kerry made their statements borders on anti-Semitic. As the very least, it's a "dog whistle" (a term the Left seems to love) for anti-Semites worldwide.

Today, Caroline Glick provides hard facts that indicate that Both Obama and Kerry are lying when they contend that no other Middle Eastern countries oppose the deal:

Although President Barack Obama harangued Israel in his speech at American University last Wednesday, claiming that the Israeli government is the only government that has publicly opposed his nuclear deal with the Iranians, Monday US congressmen now shuttling between Egypt and Israel told Israeli reporters that Egypt opposes the nuclear deal.

As for the Gulf states, according to the US media, last week they told visiting US Secretary of State John Kerry that they support the nuclear deal ...

But the fact is that the only foreign minister who expressed such support was Qatari Foreign Minister Khaled al-Attiyah. To be sure, Attiyah was charged to speak for all of his counterparts because Qatar holds the GCC’s rotating chairmanship. But given that Qatar has staked out a pro-Iranian foreign policy in stark contrast to its neighbors and GCC partners, Attiyah’s statement is impossible to take seriously without the corroboration of his colleagues ...

In Attiyah’s words, Kerry promised that the deal would place Iran’s nuclear sites under continuous inspections. “Consequently,” he explained, “the GCC countries have welcomed on this basis what has been displayed and what has been talked about by His Excellency Mr. Kerry.”

The problem of course is that Kerry wasn’t telling the truth. And the Arabs knew he was lying. The deal does not submit Iran’s nuclear sites to a rigorous inspection regime. And the GCC, including Qatar, opposes it. [emphasis mine]

In his briefing with Israeli reporters, the high-level US official rejected the importance of the détente between Israel and its Arab neighbors because he claimed the Arabs have not changed their position regarding their view of a final peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians.

But this is also nonsense. To be sure, the official position of the Saudis and the UAE is still the so-called Arab peace initiative from 2002 which stipulates that the Arabs will only normalize relations with Israel after it has ceded Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria and the Golan and allowed millions of foreign-born Arabs to freely immigrate to the shrunken Jewish state. In other words, their official position is that they will only have normal relations with Israel after Israel destroys itself.

But their official position is no longer their actual position. Their actual position is to view Israel as a strategic ally.

The senior official told the Israeli reporters that in order to show that “their primary security concern is Iran,” then as far as the Arabs are concerned, “resolving some of the other issues in the region, including the Palestinian issue should be in their interest. We would like to see them more invested in moving the process forward.”

In the real world, there is no peace process. And the Palestinian factions are fighting over who gets to have better relations with Iran. Monday we learned that PA leader Mahmoud Abbas wishes to visit Iran in the coming months in the hopes of getting the money that until recently was enjoyed by his Hamas rivals.

Sadly, it looks like Congressional Democrats will cave on the Iran deal, will act like a phalanx of Stepford wives and support this president by not overturning this historically bad deal with a notoriously bad actor, Iran.

History will judge them for this cowardice—for putting party ahead of the best interests of their country, or at the very least, for accepting lies as truth and naive claims as irrefutable.

There may, however, be an unintended (by Obama, at least) silver lining. As Glick reports, many Arab states and Israel oppose this deal and have moved closer together in that opposition. All will not be sweetness and light, but Egypt, the Saudis, the majority of the GCC oppose Obama's capitulation to Iran, and if that leads to a form of detente with Israel as they all work to oppose Iran, so much the better.