The White House has responded to the wave of terror in Israel with tepid and ambiguous statements, condemning Israel’s “excessive” use of force, claiming that both sides are responsible, and urging both Israel and the Palestinians to “tamp down the violence.” Victor Davis Hanson sees such comments as symptoms of a larger problem:
[T]he present U.S. government—which is subsidizing the Palestinians to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars a year—is incapable of distinguishing those who employ terrorist violence from the victims against whom the terrorism is directed. . . .
[Meanwhile], President Obama’s Middle East policies are in shambles. . . . Amid the collapse of American power, [Mahmoud] Abbas has scanned the Middle East, surveyed Obama’s pronouncements—from his initial Al Arabiya interview and Cairo speech to his current contextualizations and not-so-private slapdowns of Netanyahu—and has wagered that Obama likes Israel even less than his public statements might suggest. Accordingly, Abbas assumes that there might be few consequences from America if he incites another “cycle of violence.” . . .
The Obama administration is the first postmodern government in American history, and it has adopted almost all of the general culture’s flawed relativist assumptions about human nature. . . . The question is not only whether the Obama administration, in private, favors the cause of the radical Palestinians over a Western ally like Israel, but also whether it is even intellectually and morally capable of distinguishing a democratic state that protects human rights from a non-democratic, authoritarian, and terrorist regime that historically has hated the West, and the United States in particular—and is currently engaged in clear-cut aggression.
Read more on National Review: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/425787/obama-palestinians-istaelis