He's right.
Historian: Obama Abandoning Israel for Muslim WorldMonday, 11 Apr 2011 04:56 PM
By Henry J. Reske and Kathleen Walker
President Barack Obama’s shift of American foreign policy away from Israel toward a Muslim world that “hates our guts” is a perilous tack, historian and author Bruce Thornton tells Newsmax.TV. And Obama’s swing away from Israel is “his most disastrous mistake,” Thornton said.
However, Obama is not alone in making mistakes in the Mideast — his pandering to Iran follows in the footsteps of nearly every administration since 1979, said Thornton, author of the new book, “The Wages of Appeasement: Ancient Athens, Munich, and Obama’s America.”
The power shift away from Israel has been going on for decades, said Thornton, a California State University professor.
“George Bush two, he pushed back against that, and I think there were some benefits to that, but that ideal — that some American president is going to step in and going to resolve that long crisis — is absurd,” Thornton said. “What we should realize is that our staunchest ally is Israel, the only functioning democracy in the Middle East, in the heart of a region that hates our guts. And rather than undermining them and asking them to use their citizens as sort of sacrifices for some mythic peace agreement, we should support them to the hilt, and it’s a disastrous move on his part.”
Obama is appeasing Iran, Thornton said, adding, “Let’s be fair, this has been consistently going on since 1979 through presidents of both political parties.”
Thornton contends that Iran declared war on the United States in 1979 when it took U.S. hostages. It also has financed Hezbollah, which was responsible for the attack on the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut that killed more than 200 Marines, and organizations killing Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan, he said.
“So they have been at war with us, but we haven’t responded in kind,” he said. “Instead we have tried various ways, whether Ronald Reagan’s Iran-Contra fiasco or currently today the failed outreach of Barack Obama, not to deal with the fact that this is an aggressor who does not want to get along with us.”
Obama has made the mistake that many Democrats make, treating terrorism as a criminal issue to deal with through investigation and prosecution instead of acknowledging that radical jihadist simply hate the united states, he said.
Thornton alleged that dishonesty surrounds the civil war in Libya, and he blamed all sides for it.
“From the right, too,” he said. “I mean the guys who think there’s a bunch of Tom Jeffersons and Samuel Adams out there in Libya that we need to support because they want to create New England town hall democracy.
“We don’t know who these people are,” he said. “We have chosen sides in a conflict and we don’t know which side we’re supporting. We should have learned from what happened in Egypt in a few short weeks, where it’s becoming clear that those who have empowered by the toppling of Mubarak are the Muslim Brotherhood and the Muslim Brotherhood is jihadist, anti-American, anti-Semitic organization. And I’m not sure it serves our interest.”
http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/thornton-obama-israel-bush/2011/04/11/id/392534
