by Daniel Pipes*

In a much-touted speech today bearing the modest title of “Remarks by the President on the Middle East and North Africa,” Barack Obama responded to the Arab revolt of the past five months with elements of common sense and even eloquence (”through the moral force of nonviolence, the people of the region have achieved more change in six months than terrorists have accomplished in decades”). He also defined a U.S. policy in support of reform and against violence I find worthy of discussion and debate.

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by Raymond Ibrahim*

One of the problems with Obama’s Middle East speech was that parts of it were so deliberately balanced — so meant to appease all sides — that they go nowhere. For example, look at the portions where he discusses democracy in the Middle East versus the alternative — Islamist rule, which he does not name. One sentence seems to say that a “true” democracy is necessary, only to be followed by one that seems open to Islamist rule, and so on. Consider the following excerpts:

Not every country will follow our particular form of representative democracy, and there will be times when our short-term interests do not align perfectly with our long-term vision of the region.

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by Efraim Karsh*

In the opening episode of the iconic series Boardwalk Empire, Nucky Thompson, Atlantic City’s bootlegging strongman, tells a group of pro-prohibition women activists a gutwrenching story about his abject childhood, ravaged by the vagaries of alcoholism. Asked by his driver, a young aspiring gangster, about the story’s veracity, Thompson retorts: “The first law of politics is to never let the truth get in the way of a good story.”

This episode comes to mind upon reading Mahmoud Abbas’s recent New York Times op-ed. Turning the saga of Israel’s birth upside down, the “moderate” PLO chairman and president of the Palestinian National Authority says not a word of the Jewish acceptance of Palestinian Arab statehood, as part of the UN partition resolution of November 1947, let alone the violent Palestinian response to the resolution. Instead he reminisces on his childhood in an attempt to turn aggressors into hapless victims and vice versa.

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By Fern Sidman

On Monday, May 16th, FOX news personality and conservative talk show host Glenn Beck announced his intention of organizing a major rally in Jerusalem that is scheduled for August. During his morning radio program, he reminded his listeners of his previous rally, held in Washington, DC on August 28, 2010 called “Restoring Honor” which drew hundreds of thousands of people. Mr. Beck exhorted “all decent people and people of faith” to join him in Jerusalem in a rally called “Restoring Courage”. Having recently returned from a trip to Israel, where he visited the Temple Mount, he said upon his departure, “The Temple Mount almost pulsated. I could feel it.”

Glenn Beck in Israel - May 2011

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by Daniel Pipes*

I predicted a few weeks ago that Arab upheavals might inspire Palestinians to shift “away from warfare and terrorism in favor of non-violent political action. That could include massive non-violent demonstrations such as marching on Israeli towns, borders, and checkpoints.”

Right on cue, on what Palestinians call “Nakba Day,” a rejection of Israel’s gaining independence on May 15, 1948, mass activity took place in a coordinated and unprecedented fashion today. A New York Times headline aptly summarizes events: “Israel Clashes with Protesters on Four Borders,” being those of Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank, and Gaza.

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by Steven J. Rosen*

Having sidelined Barack Obama’s peace initiative by refusing to return to the negotiations table without apriori Israeli concessions, the Palestinian leadership seeks to secure an international declaration of statehood at the next U.N. General Assembly session in September 2011. This “date certain” strategy, whereby its entitlement to a state will be fulfilled by the world powers, has long been preferred by the Palestinian leadership to any arduous, bilateral negotiation with Israel, which would require painful concessions. The Palestinians enjoy wide support in many European capitals, and they know that the Obama administration is close to their positions on many of the core issues. So forcing the statehood demand into a multilateral forum can entice governments into satisfying the Palestinian aspirations by a fixed date.

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by Janet Doerflinger*

Prominent Middle East studies professors argue that Israel should conduct negotiations with Hamas, a U.S. State Department-designated terrorist organization that controls the Gaza Strip. Thus, they demand that Israel — a sovereign state — negotiate with a terrorist organization responsible for murdering and maiming many innocent Israelis and dedicated to Israel’s destruction.

Among these professors:

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Our idiot “president” Barack Obama “… is requiring participation of the Muslim Brotherhood in any prospective new Egyptian government, while the brothers themselves are telling their countrymen to ‘prepare for war.’” Obama’s naivete and foolishness have gone outside any normal, agreed standards of decency. The Muslim Brotherhood is a terrorist group whom murdered Anwar Sadat, the very Egyptian president who made peace with Israel! Obama, in his ultimate, diaper-wearing-foreign-policy-making may want to read the damn newspapers:

A political leader of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood Thursday called on any government that replaces Hosni Mubarak’s regime to withdraw from the 32-year-old peace treaty with Israel.

“After President Mubarak steps down and a provisional government is formed, there is a need to dissolve the peace treaty with Israel,” Rashad al-Bayoumi, a deputy leader of the outlawed movement, said on Japan’s NHTV. …

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By Barry Rubin

Since predicting the future is hard, to say the least, it’s always interesting when one can clearly see a crisis looming months ahead of time. The usual pattern is for the impending problem to be ignored until the last minute, then it is suddenly discovered by journalists and policymakers with great astonishment.

Often, they then misdiagnose the causes of the problem precisely because they never understood why it happened in the first place.

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by Steven J. Rosen*

President Obama has affirmed repeatedly that, under his leadership, America’s bond with Israel is absolute, unshakeable, and rock solid. But the Israeli public is not convinced. A Jerusalem Post poll in March 2010 found that just 9 percent of Jewish Israelis think his administration is pro-Israel, against 48 percent who think it is pro-Palestinian. J Street’s pollster, Jim Gerstein, looked for a different result, but even his survey found that 55 percent of Israelis do not believe that Obama supports Israel.

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by Steven J. Rosen*

For the first time since the Oslo peace process started 18 years ago, Palestinian leaders are openly refusing to negotiate with the government of Israel, and U.S. President Barack Obama’s administration is doing very little about it. As Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Authority president, explained the policy on Dec. 9, “We will not agree to negotiate as long as settlement building continues.” The Arab League is backing Abbas in this refusal, says League chief Amr Moussa, because “the direction of talks has become ineffective and it has decided against the resumption of negotiations.”

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By Barry Rubin

George Mitchell, the U.S. envoy to the Middle East, has given the first hint about the Obama Administration’s future strategy. He said that he will now take six weeks to talk to Israel and the Palestinian Authority to find out what they want. One idea he will present is that the two sides carry out indirect talks through the United States–essentially what has been going on for the last two years with no progress.

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By Barry Rubin

I think this lead from Jackson Diehl’s Washington Post article says it all:

“The latest collapse of the Middle East peace process has underlined a reality that the Obama administration has resisted since it took office–that neither the current Israeli government nor the Palestinian Authority shares its passion for moving quickly toward a two-state settlement. And it has left President Obama with a tough choice: quietly shift one of his prized foreign policy priorities to a back burner — or launch a risky redoubling of U.S. efforts.”

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By Barry Rubin

As I predicted here ten days ago, the Obama Administration has now given up attempts to get Israel to agree to a three-month freeze of construction on existing settlements.

Here is the most fascinating sentence in the New York Times’ coverage:

“Officials said the administration decided to pull the plug because it concluded that even if Mr. Netanyahu persuaded his cabinet to accept an extension - which he had not yet been able to do - the 90-day negotiating period would not have produced the progress on core issues that the administration originally had hoped for.”

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By Barry Rubin

While the outcome still isn’t clear, it seems that a new example of failure and humiliation is unfolding for the Obama Administration’s Middle East policy.

It appears increasingly unlikely that the president’s high-profile effort to restart Israel-Palestinian talks will succeed during the remainder of 2010 or even well beyond that time.

This Administration has had a very clear idea of what it wanted to achieve:

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