IRAN: For Obama, the road to Tehran leads through Jerusalem

Barely noted in the reports about Monday's meeting between President Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was a revealing exchange toward the end of the question-and-answer session with a small group of reporters.

The president was asked whether he agreed with Netanyahu's view that dismantling Iran's nuclear program and getting it stop supporting militant groups in the Levant was the first step toward a resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict. 

Obama said while the charged atmosphere in the Middle East makes it tough for Israel to negotiate with its rivals, he viewed the situation the other way around. 

Read the little-cited quotes below:

"If there is a linkage between Iran and the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, I personally believe it actually runs the other way. To the extent that we can make peace with the Palestinians -- between the Palestinians and the Israelis, then I actually think it strengthens our hand in the international community in dealing with a potential Iranian threat...

... Imagine how much less mischief a Hezbollah or a Hamas could do if in fact we had moved a Palestinian-Israeli track in a direction that gave the Palestinian people hope? And if Hezbollah and Hamas [are] weakened, imagine how that impacts Iran's ability to make mischief, and vice versa."

Obama's view puts him at odds with Netanyahu and his American allies and in line with a group of other foreign policy wonks such as Cato Institute scholar Leon Hadar, who recently penned an analysis for the journal Foreign Affairs that appeared to reflect Obama's opinion that the Palestinian question poses a greater threat to U.S. and Israeli interests than Iran. From Hadar:

"Obama must recognize that the main threat to Israel's existence as a Jewish and democratic state is not Iran but its conflict with the Palestinians -- a conflict that will continue to serve as a catalyst for growing anti-Israel and anti-American radicalization in the region at large unless and until it is resolved."

-- Borzou Daragahi in Beirut

Photo: A handout picture released by the Israeli government press office shows President Obama  welcoming Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House on Monday. Credit: Moshe Milner / AFP/Getty Images

Comments

[rezasantorini]

This still boils down to the Muslim world against the Jewish world. With everyone screaming my religion is peaceful. Take religion out of the equation, take religion out of the law and keep it within the holy places of worship and your own home. Let me choose my own clothes, my own food and my own mate. Let me be free to live my own life as long as I don't harm you...seeing my knee or my smile does not harm you. Don't look.

[rezasantorini]

Obviously we've not spent enough to protect the Jews, for the terrorist Muslims are still disappointed that they haven't killed enough Jews and Israelis and Americans. Haven't you read the news.

Islamic hate toward Jews began in Medina and in the dark ages and continued through the dark ages, into the Crusades, through the Hitler years and until today. Nothing has changed...nothing will. We need to support Israel ... or Islam will kill off everyone but Muslims.

[Rotty]

quote: "If there is a linkage between Iran and the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, I personally believe it actually runs the other way. To the extent that we can make peace with the Palestinians -- between the Palestinians and the Israelis, then I actually think it strengthens our hand in the international community in dealing with a potential Iranian threat...

I agree.
This fact should be obvious to everyone}[b]
"The price of freedom IS granting it to others."[/b]

[rezasantorini]

Notice that while Bibi and Obama were talking Hamas sent a rocket or two into Israel...he thinks Obama is a Muslim and wouldn't notice.

Is Hamas right? Iran of course had to flex its tiny muscle as well.

Such macho people with tiny weenies.

[Karl S.]

Iranian hard liners, if need to, will pay Israelies to bomb somewhere in Iran so they can stay in power and make more money. Also, Israeli hard liners need current Iranian regime to stay in power. None of them are worried about a war, bacause it will a controlled one. As long as Arab mentally is rulling Iran there will be nothing good coming Iran's way. But soon the rising Ortodox Christianity in Russia along with Russian nationality will make iranian regime to think twice. The US has been long enough patient with Iran's rulers without ever considering that this encourages the current Iran to take advantage of it.

[Ali Alavi]

Israelis are in the habit of haggling the Palestinians out of lands and that is why the rest of the world is not sympathetic to their expansionist policies and racist attitude. The Middle East is like an old Bazar. The United States should make Israelis sit down and come to an agreement with Palestinians and finalize it. I am certain the Arab world and the rest of the sympathizers of the Palestinians will stop complaining once they see an actual deal finalized.

[David]

with this meeting it is now confirmed (at least for me) that Obama is just another Bush but now with more kind face and different color.I hope he is not going to be another nightmare for Americans and start another War.Israel is not in a position to threaten Iran.They know better than everyone that attacking Iran is the most catastrophic action one can do.If they were able to do this they had done it years before when Iranian started their nuclear activity.
I am sorry for Mr. Obama.He is making a big mistake.

[Javad]

Look at how Israelis spewing venom on a nation which save them from extinction and gave them a land with financial support to be a viable state.
The only other nation which also have done this, should figure out what's coming to them in future and learn not to make same mistake!

[Joe]

Obama have to dress down and put down Netanyahu soon in order to make world believe that US government got a handle on her internal sovereignty, unfortunately world have lost their faith on US since pro Israelis lobbies had made mockery out of US image in world so far.
Bibi is just diverting attention in order to pick pockets, apparently billions of free dollars a year is not enough for common hustlers and they just want more in order to let Palestinians be free. I'll say lets play with our dividend from current US investment instead of injecting more in to losing portfolio which called Israel Inc.!

[m livingston]

Has anyone seriously considered this?

Barack Hussein Obama TOTALS 18 letters

666 TOTALS 18

What REALLY is his agenda?

[Saint Michael Traveler]

Nuclear Bomb: USA, Iran and Israel

The steps required to allay our fear that Iran in the future may develop Nuclear Bomb are:

A: Nuclear Fuel Cycle Iranian Consortium;

USA should join the consortium among others Japan, Germany, France and England to actively monitor the Iranian fuel cycle activity too. IAEA has consistently asserted that the agency could not find any indications that Iran is diverting the fuel cycle for nuclear bomb development. Iran has asserted that their activities are limited to development of fuel for nuclear reactor.

B: Nuclear Shield;

An international nuclear shield must protect all nations in the Middle East, including Iran;

C: A nuclear- bomb-free Middle East;

This action will remove any pressure from Iran to develop nuclear bomb in the future for deterrence against nuclear bomb Israeli state.

President Harry Truman in 1946 gave this statement about nuclear bomb:” It is a terrible weapon, and it should not be used on innocent men, women and children who have nothing whatever to do with this military aggression. That happens when it is used.” He was referring to using the bomb on Japan.

There are currently nine states that have successfully detonated nuclear weapons: the United States, Russia (successor state to the Soviet Union), the United Kingdom, France, and China, India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel. All these nations have both chemical and biological weapons. Only the United States has used nuclear bombs, both on Japan. North Korea has recently tested a crude nuclear bomb.

President Truman said: “Starting an atomic war is totally unthinkable for rational men.” [Truman, public Papers]

The Middle East should be the starting point toward President Obama’s dream of a world free of all nuclear bombs.

[Majid Saatchi New York]

U.S. President Barack H. Obama (and his National Security Advisor, General James Jones, as well as his White House Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel), the Quartet’s Middle-East Emissary and former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel have it backwards: attempting to solve the Palestinian statehood question will not solve the Iranian problem; in fact, it will exacerbate it, as it permits the Tehran regime to continue to play the role of spoiler by its supplying of weaponry, training and funding to its rejectionist Arab proxies: Hizballah in Lebanon and Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza. In assuming that these jihadist terrorist groups can be converted to a position that accepts the sovereign Jewish State of Israel (in whatever configuration of borders) they are as likely to achieve success as they would be in a project seeking to raise Satan back into Heaven and the good graces of God. As the popular saying goes, “Hell will freeze over five times” before the jihadists change their ways.

On the other hand, if the Iranian problem is solved—whether through application of the military option (a difficult and costly operation) or through the application of very stringent sanctions and embargoes—particularly of all refined petroleum products, causing the shaky Iranian economy to implode, and thereby forcing the regime to change its ways (highly unlikely) or else face the wrath of the Iranian people which has supported over 5000 anti-regime demonstrations and acts of protest annually for the past three years, and risk a popular revolution—whatever causes the Iranian government to change its tune (reform being unlikely and revolution possible if concessions to the mullah regime are ended), the results will mean that the support for the Arab rejection front—especially the jihadists—will disappear. Without Iranian funds and weaponry, Hamas and Hizballah cannot survive as spoilers. And once these jihadist rejectionists are removed from the picture, Palestinian moderates could be capable of finding their voices once again.

Our three savants have suggested that if Israel only makes more concessions to the Palestinians, it will help the moderate Arab regimes to unite against Iran and its nuclear program. Plain and simple: they’ve got it backwards. Maybe it’s because Semitic languages like Hebrew and Arabic go from right to left, and European languages go the opposite way, but the three are not reading events correctly. The truth is that because of convergent interests to prevent radical Islamist groups from gaining power, the moderate Arab states such as, Egypt, Jordan, and Morocco, which already have peaceful relations with Israel, and Saudi Arabia which talks to Israel a lot more behind the scenes than most realize, already are aboard the anti-Iran train. So, while Palestinian statehood is an important issue, it is not the magic catalyst needed to cement together an anti-Iran coalition. The Arab “moderates” already are united in opposing Iran and its blatant interference in Arab affairs in Iraq and Lebanon and covert interference elsewhere throughout the Arab world.

Egypt’s recent discovery of a Hizballah network on its soil, attempting not only to smuggle weaponry supplied by Iran through Egypt into Gaza to re-supply Hamas, but also to destabilize Egypt through a series of terrorist attacks on Egyptian soil with particular concentration on Sinai resorts where many of the potential victims are likely to be Israelis, served as a wake up call to the Mubarak government of the danger that this Iranian proxy poses to the land of the Nile. President Mubarak regarded the Hizballah operation as a threat to Egypt ’s national security and publicly said as much on April 23rd. Egypt ’s government–controlled press went so far as to accuse the network of conspiring to stage a coup in Egypt . The Lebanese newspaper al-Mustakbal reports that Egypt has identified four of the 49-member terror network as agents of the al-Quds unit of the Iranian Pasdaran (Islamic Revolution Guard Corps). The result of this discovery, made in late 2008, but kept under wraps until about a month ago, has been to cause Egypt to view Iran as its enemy and Israel as an ally in the war against the Islamist jihad emanating from Tehran and the various branches of the Muslim Brotherhood.

If one follows the recommendations of these three naifs, unfortunately we get results where the jihadists regard themselves as having achieved another victory. Every concession or retreat from territories conquered in wars, whether it be from southern Lebanon occupied from 1982 to 2000 in order to prohibit the PLO and other Palestinian radical groups from attacking northern Israel, or the Gaza Strip—occupied from 1967 to 2005 as a result of the 1967 Six-Day War—has resulted in jihadist groups such as Hizballah (in Lebanon) and Hamas (in Gaza) taking over and using the vacated territories as launching pads for attacks on Israel. Rather than decreasing the antagonism of these radical groups to Israel and the West, retreat has caused them to increase their antagonism as they believe that they are drawing closer to the day of their ultimate victory. The recent attack of the Taliban in Pakistan —breaking out of the Swat Valley and marching into neighboring Buner—is the result of concessions made to the Taliban in earlier agreements made by the Pakistani government that attempted to achieve a ceasefire.

What Obama, Blair, and Merkel seem to forget is that Hamas is a first cousin of al-Qaeda, and al-Qaeda is an ally of the Taliban. All three ultimately are the progeny of the Sunni radical fundamentalist (Islamist) Muslim Brotherhood. And although Hizballah, both in Lebanon and Iraq, is a Shiite radical fundamentalist organization that is loyal to the Khomeinist regime of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei of the Islamic Republic of Iran, the goals vis-à-vis Israel and the West are remarkably similar despite the doctrinal differences between Shia and Sunni. Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman astutely has asked: “How does one negotiate with a party that seeks one’s destruction? What is there to negotiate?” The Iranian mullah regime and its proxies Hizballah and Hamas have been quite open about their shared goals: for 30 years we have heard a steady litany of curses, condemnations, and maledictions upon the West in general and the United States and Israel in particular. In that same time period we have seen that the Islamist Iranian regime has taken every possible opportunity to attack America , as well as American and Western interests. Today, and for the last five years, Iraq in large degree has been a proxy war with Iran . The resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan was aided and abetted through material aid given to the Taliban and al-Qaeda by the Tehran mullahs at the agency of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. That Iran and the Taliban often have been enemies in the past should not blind us to the truth and applicability to our situation of the old Middle-Eastern adage: “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” Iran will support the Taliban and al-Qaeda as long as it is useful to do so in its war with the West.

Returning our focus to the Palestine statehood question, it should be stressed that as long as the radical fundamentalists such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad have a strong voice in Palestinian politics—something that will continue as long as Tehran has the ability to fund and supply these radicals—the voice of the moderates, of people like Professor Sari Nussibeh, will be silenced, and fruitful dialogue stymied. If Obama, Blair, and Merkel really want to hear the voice of moderation from the Palestinian side—and it would behoove them to be sure that Arabic statements correspond with English ones—they will need to take adequate steps to silence the cacophony that issues from the kakistocracy of Tehran .

One of the quickest ways to alert the Tehran regime that we are no longer taken in by its ruses and subterfuges, and that we indeed mean business, is to undo the ridiculous 1997 political error of placing the principal Iranian opposition movement, the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI), aka Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK), on the U.S. Department of State’s Foreign Terrorist Organization list (FTO). Done as a political gift to the Khatami regime, it was a travesty of justice as well as a political blunder, and should be reversed just as similar proscriptions were removed in the U.K and the E.U. at the order of the respective high courts of each as they reviewed the case earlier this year. Leveling the playing field between the Iranian opposition and the Tehran regime costs us nothing; it just might allow the Iranian people to save everyone else a lot of grief as they rescue their democratic revolution from the hands of the mullahs who hijacked and destroyed it 30 years ago.

The Obama administration has made it a hallmark of its policy to oppose any and all abuse of human rights, especially of minorities and women. If this noble policy is to have validity, it must be applied equally throughout the world. The Obama government cannot close its eyes to Iran ’s 30-year abysmal record on human rights and continue to protect the mullah regime from its democratic opposition, the PMOI/MEK. Now is the time to take the PMOI off of the FTO , an action requested of President Obama by 503 European parliamentarians just this past week. If this is done, the mullahs will finally begin to take us seriously and realize that we mean what we say. But, as long as the PMOI remains on the FTO , Tehran knows that we are bluffing, and that we’re doing a lousy job of it.

[Paul Tyler]

Also maybe funding(even though we've spent enough) might help the Middle Eastern people. Since the US is tied to Israel we should show our friendship.

[Paul Tyler]

What does Obama plan to do to make peace between Israel and Palestine? Could America actually help by assisting them. Maybe a defense act or something could help to make peace.