Libel Is Obama’s Latest Weapon In His War On Israel
Diplomacy: Now the White House dubiously charges that Israel spied on the U.S. This president, with Nixonian obsession, is so bent on wrecking relations with our top Mideast ally that we’re close to a de facto state of war.
Behold what’s buried in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal — a claim of Israeli spying, which was obviously planted by one or more nameless administration officials seeking to make the Israelis’ newly re-elected leader look like a U.S. enemy:
“While U.S. intelligence officials believe secured U.S. communications are relatively safe from the Israelis, they say European communications are vulnerable.”
The Israelis, it turns out, almost certainly got their information from eavesdropping not on U.S., but on European and Iranian diplomatic communications — which virtually every U.S. embassy in the world does.
The alleged eavesdropping was supplemented by gathering “information from confidential U.S. briefings, informants and diplomatic contacts in Europe,” the current and former U.S. officials who spoke to the Journal claimed — the latter practice being little more than what reporters covering the Iranian talks do.
It wasn’t so much the alleged spying that upset the president anyway, we are told, but the sharing of the information gathered, especially with members of Congress, “to drain support from a high-stakes deal intended to limit Iran’s nuclear program, current and former officials said.”
Now why is The Most Transparent Administration In History afraid of information? Shouldn’t the U.S. government itself be sharing information about the world’s leading terrorist sponsor state with America’s staunchest ally in the Middle East? And sharing it with the American people too, through their representatives in Congress, on both sides of the aisle?
“It is another thing for Israel to steal U.S. secrets and play them back to U.S. legislators to undermine U.S. diplomacy,” someone identified as a senior U.S. official complained to the Journal.
But it is not “diplomacy” being undermined; it is appeasement of a major terrorist enemy. And undermining appeasement is a good thing.
And how about the irony of this observation, also buried deep in the Journal story:
“As secret talks with Iran progressed into 2013, U.S. intelligence agencies monitored Israel’s communications to see if the country knew of the negotiations” — in other words, the U.S. was spying on Israel.
Not only that, but as we know, the administration also actively sought, through former campaign aides, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s defeat in last week’s election. That’s not undermining Israeli diplomacy, but rather Israeli democracy.
This administration is presiding over unprecedented domestic surveillance, including phone calls and emails of perfectly innocent U.S. citizens. It listened in on German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and it greatly reduced if not eliminated the information about the Iran talks it was giving Israel.
Now the White House enlists the media to libel Israel as it struggles to survive. In seeking a grand pact with an enemy power, President Obama is going to war with arguably our most loyal ally since World War II.
