Prominent Conservatives Agree there is No Change in Policy Toward Israel

Ira N. Forman — June 26, 2009 – 2:38 pm | Israel | Obama Comments (3) Add a comment

Much of the right-wing in this country has decided that the only way to win an argument is to make an outrageous claim. Apparently it matters little if what is said has anything to do with reality. This is particularly true when conservatives attack President Barack Obama for his attitudes toward Israel. For example, the normally hysterical Richard Behr (political correspondant for the American Thinker) is going around suggesting that President Barack Obama is America’s first Islamist president.

So its refreshing when two prominent American Jewish conservatives - Richard Perle and Daniel Pipes - are quoted as saying that Obama’s policy toward Israel is not really different from the policy of past presidents. In a July 6 article which appeared in The Jerusalem Report magazine , “The Word from the President,” Perle states that “[t]he President has a policy and its very similar to all previous American administration policies.” Pipes noted that Obama’s Cairo speech contained “no new approaches nor new policies. The speech was better than I feared.”

Another analyst in the story, Tamara Coffman Wittes, of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy, told the Report that people are “trying too hard” to read between the lines and overreacting to the President’s Cairo speech. Wittes added that, “...I don’t think Obama has articulated anything that wasn’t articulated by his predecessors.”

The Behrs of the world apparently are determined to whip themselves into a frenzy over the Administration’s policy in the Middle East. However, Perle has a piece of advice…”Everyone is reading too much into the conflict between the U.S. and Israel…just relax a bit.”

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