When it serves their purposes, Qatar’s staggeringly wealthy two most powerful players strut about in very traditional Arab garb. But when the occasion deems it expedient, they soothe subliminal western anxieties by donning tailored suits of the exceptionally elegant sort that proliferates in European Union forums. That purportedly imparts an impression of trustworthiness.

The cousins’ policy line is just as chameleon-like. There’s a yawning gap between their utterances in English and in Arabic.

Not too many years ago, Qatar was an Israeli success story, or so it was widely believed in Jerusalem. Relations with Doha, especially trade ties, flourished since the mid-Nineties. They weren’t formal or full, yet they were hardly covert. Everyone knew about them. Unnamed Qatari higher-ups had reportedly visited Israel and Shimon Peres, then deputy premier, openly visited Qatar in 2007. Tzipi Livni did the same a year later. Other Israelis, such as Ehud Barak, hobnobbed with the emir.

But Qatar unilaterally abrogated these ties after Operation Cast Lead. Doha offered to restore them if Israel allowed unrestricted shipments of building materials to Gaza. Since these can be used to build bunkers, Israel refused.

However, the Qatari transformation isn’t only Israeli-linked. Qatar had become the financial sponsor of the misnamed Arab Spring, bankrolling assorted Muslim Brotherhood insurgents and their allies. The upheavals shaking the Arab world – Syria foremost – were in effect orchestrated by Doha.

The emir – despite his excellent personal ties with Israelis, Americans and other Westerners – has used his clout and unimaginable riches to bring to power and sustain Islamist forces that are fundamentally inimical to the West, to say nothing of their implacable hatred for the Jewish state.

With abundant hype, pomp and circumstance the emir visited Gaza last autumn. It was the first such high-profile gesture by a head of state since Hamas seized power in 2007. It allowed Gaza to eclipse Ramallah and demonstrate that the post-Arab-Spring rise of the Muslim Brotherhood bolsters Hamas, itself a Brotherhood offshoot.

This yet again underscored the Brotherhood’s reinforced impact, via collusion with Gulf State Islamists. The inherent incendiary potential cannot be belittled, even if US President Barak Obama prefers to obfuscate the gloomy reality he has helped create.

No matter what spin was spun, the emir was clearly seen as meddling in the intra-Palestinian squabbles, putting his full political weight behind the utterly rejectionist Hamas that explicitly proclaims its aspiration to destroy Israel.

The emir underwrites his support with financial largesse as well. This puts him in league with particularly fanatic forces. He has, for example, been a most generous benefactor to such militant jihadist groups as Jabhat al-Nusra, an al-Qaida subsidiary now on the warpath in Syria.

Not to be omitted is the pivotal importance of the Qatar-based al-Jazeera news network, which serves the Thanis’ agenda at the expense of even token journalistic integrity. Al-Jazeera’s inflammatory tendentious reporting has fomented insurgencies in Yemen, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and Syria.

One would therefore assume that such non-too-innocuous intervention would decisively give the lie to Qatar’s purported moderation and peaceful inclinations.

But on the opportune occasion of the Qatari prime minister’s recent stopover in Washington, the chameleon switched colors again. Stylishly attired in a dark confidence-boosting business suit and schmoozing Secretary of State John Kerry and Vice President Joe Biden in cordial English, their guest successfully peddled worn old merchandise as a novel revolutionary concept.

Needless to stress, Obama’s crew bought it all, lock stock and barrel as per the Kerry/Biden inclination from the outset. Perhaps they altogether suggested the stratagem that they later appeared to laud as an extraordinary breakthrough in attempts to resurrect Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.Of course the raison d’être of these talks is – one way or another – to squeeze Israel back into those incredibly untenable 1949 armistice lines, in effect till June 4, 1967 and now misrepresented as bona fide borders.

And so, the international community and Israel’s ever-obliging left-wing were quite expectedly wowed when al-Thani declared that “The Arab League delegation affirmed that agreement should be based on the two-state solution on the basis of the 4th of June 1967 line, with the [possibility] of comparable and mutual agreed minor swap of the land.”

Been there. Heard that. But so what? When supposed honest brokers determine that the secondhand castoff is in fact spanking new, their say-so ostensibly constitutes a sterling seal of approval. Such recycling in turn becomes a means to ply more pressure on Israel with a perceived fresh Arab concession, which is nothing of the sort.

For one thing, Qatar’s Gazan protégés spurn the rehashed concoction. Haniyeh minced no words: “To those who speak of land swaps we say: Palestine is not a property, it’s not for sale, not for a swap and cannot be traded.”

Ramallah figurehead Mahmoud Abbas wasn’t more forthcoming. He couldn’t afford to even appear to be.

But even that’s not new. Territorial swaps were already discussed by then-premier Ehud Barak in his near-desperate peace-drive of 2000-2001 that began in Stockholm, continued in Camp David and expired ignominiously in Taba.

Barak’s ultra-dovish foreign minister Shlomo Ben-Ami kept detailed journals throughout the negotiations. These featured in a very lengthy interview granted to Ha’aretz’s Ari Shavit. Published on September 14, 2001 and entitled “The Day the Peace Died,” Ben-Ami’s extensive monologue still offers spellbinding insights.

Among them is that when territorial swaps were proposed, the Palestinian side “would only consider taking possession of Kochav Yai’r” – where Barak resided at the time. There were also not-so-veiled threats of violence. Chief PLO negotiator Saeb Erekat named September 13, 2000 as a deadline. Two weeks thereafter the intifada raged.

When the prolonged haggling was over, Ben-Ami retroactively understood that Israel “operated under misguided conceptions about the other side’s intentions. For Arafat Oslo constituted a mega-camouflage behind which he exerted political pressure and employed varying measures of terror to undermine the very notion of a two-state solution.”

Ben-Ami notes that while Israel kept retreating from one “red line” to another, eventually agreeing to handover almost anything the Palestinians insisted upon, including much of Jerusalem and its Holiest of Holies, “never at any point did the Palestinians so much as draft any counter-proposals.”

That, Ben-Ami belatedly concluded, “was the crux of the matter. The Israeli side forever finds itself in a dilemma: either we quit because this bunch is unwilling to suggest anything, or we manage one more concession, one more kvetch [squeeze in Yiddish]. At the end, however, even the most moderate person arrives at a point in which he admits to himself that the other side has no endgame. Kvetch after kvetch but they’re never satisfied. It never ends.”

With painstaking detail Ben-Ami lists each and every kvetch, each and every vital position from which Barak and his team were reluctantly pushed by the intractable Palestinians. Even while Israeli negotiators sacrificed Jerusalem, the Palestinians “weren’t ready for as much as allowing a face-saving formulation for Israel.”

A senior American go-between opined to Ben-Ami that “all the Palestinians want is to humiliate you.” They even degradingly rejected a last shameful Israeli entreaty for “subterranean sovereignty underneath the Temple Mount, denying that we have any right whatsoever there.”

When Ben-Ami was willing to make do with a Palestinian undertaking not to dig atop the Mount, “because it’s holy to Jews, they adamantly refused to agree to any mention of any sanctity anyplace for Jews.”

What distressed Ben-Ami most “wasn’t just their refusal but how they refused – with total contempt. They were dismissive and arrogant towards us… They weren’t willing to make even an emotional or symbolic conciliatory gesture. In the deepest sense they were loath to acknowledge that we have any claim here.”

Camp David eventually flopped, according to Ben-Ami, because “the Palestinians refused to give us any inkling about where their demands would terminate. Our impression was that they constantly sought to drag us into a black hole of another concession and another, without there being anything like a discernible finish-line.”

Ben-Ami’s unavoidable conclusion was that “more than the Palestinians want their own state they want to condemn ours… They always leave loose ends… to keep viable the option that at some future point someone would pull these ends and unravel the Jewish state.”

To be sure, like his fellow leftists, Ben-Ami even then couldn’t bring himself to fully renounce his patently indefensible ideological creed. But although still professing faith in his smitten idols, he nonetheless cautioned against “ignoring what was revealed to us – Palestinian and Islamic positions which defy our very right to exist. We mustn’t continue the culture of kvetch which might lead us to suicide…We must no longer relinquish Jewish and Israeli patriotism. We must understand that we aren’t always guilty. We must learn to say ‘till here and no farther.’ If the other side aims to destroy even this nucleus, we must steadfastly defend it.”

Ben-Ami at least learned something. But in 2008 another prime minister, Ehud Olmert, sought to magnify Barak’s errors and then some. Nonetheless, even his remarkable offer was rebuffed.

Now Netanyahu is called upon to kvetch once more, if for no other objective than for improving our tarnished image. Here, however, we need to pause and wonder why our image is at all tarnished. It’s mind-boggling how the Arabs can appear so conciliatory when sacrificing nothing, while Israel is regarded as intransigent when conceding endlessly and at great existential risk.

It may well be that our reputation is sullied precisely because of our very readiness to concede. Our pliability isn’t without detrimental consequences. Even futile negotiations do great harm down the line. Simply put, egregious territorial generosity undercuts all future Israeli bargaining positions. Once any Israeli representative has kvetched, his kvetch cannot be taken back because only Israel is always required to kvetch.

The Arab side’s show of goodwill is eminently achieved merely by sending out members of the Qatari ruling family – or their counterparts elsewhere in oil-glutted Arabia – always in their sartorial best to impress world opinion with suitable blandishments. The ingratiating manners of the movers and shakers from the house of Thani invariably predispose all and sundry in their favor while we keep kvetching.

The constabulary wasn’t much bothered but my colleague warned the teenage bikers that the cops know about their exploits. That put no damper on the hijinks. Quite the contrary, they increased in frequency, duration and decibels. When my colleague righteously admonished the loud louts, they threatened to kill him.

More indignant than ever, he again marched to the nearby police station and reported that the outrage has escalated and that his life is now in danger. The duty sergeant, who heard him out, asked matter-of-factly: “have they killed you yet?”

Since it was obvious that the plaintiff before him is alive and in a huff, the intrepid law-enforcer added condescendingly, by way of offering sage and soothing advice: “come back to us only after the boys actually kill you.”

That story stuck fast in my mind as a generic illustration for the attitude of the forces of law and order to the safety of assorted supplicants, not only on the local level. What was true in the Tel Aviv suburb back in the day, is just as true globally nowadays.

Anyone seeking action and justice is sure to be judged as a pesky irritant who disturbs the peace of the presumed guardians of fair-play. Anyone who squawks about any sort of aggression upsets stability. Nobody knows this better than Jews because, alas, the Jewish people have had so much cause to squawk.

Chaim Weizmann, who in time would become Israel’s first president, raised the alarm after the 1938 Nazi-perpetratedKristallnacht in Germany, a riotous outbreak of orchestrated pogroms that presaged the Holocaust. He would later recall international vexation with the Jews: “our protests were regarded as provocations. Our very refusal to subscribe to our own death sentence became a public nuisance.”

It therefore became the goal of policy-makers in the leading democracies to downplay German genocidal predations and adhere tenaciously to a strategy of noninterference in the “internal affairs” of the Third Reich.

Even when the Nazi death machine was already switched into its highest gear, and when WWII raged in its fullest fury, the Allied powers somehow refused to acknowledge the premeditated and methodical extermination of Europe’s Jews. No amount of proof sufficed – not until the postfactum silent evidence of the tortured remains could be viewed.

The Free World’s theme in our generation too is the same punctilious and pedantic insistence on unassailable proof. And somehow, no amount of proof ever constitutes sufficient corroboration.

Thus US President Barack Obama grudgingly mouthed something about the promise to regard any use of chemical weapons in Syria’s civil war as a “game-changer.” In the same breath, though, he cautioned that intelligence assessments about the deployment of such weapons were still preliminary. Artfully, Obama seemed to be talking tough while at the same time appealing for patience and fending off pressure for some tangible response.

It was an object lesson on how to speak a lot and say nothing. “Horrific as it is when mortars are being fired on civilians and people are being indiscriminately killed, to use potential weapons of mass destruction on civilian populations crosses another line with respect to international norms and international law,” Obama told White House reporters.

“That is going to be a game-changer, “he declared but instantly stipulated that “we have to act prudently.” Despite conceding that chemical weaponry had added “increased urgency” to the Syrian crisis, Obama took care to emphasize that more time is needed in order to provide conclusive proof. Significantly, Obama stopped short of declaring that Damascus despot Bashar Assad had already crossed the WMD “red line.”

The latest strikes attributed to Israel near Syria’s capital came in response to different red-lines in a different subplot. At this point we can only subjectively speculate on whether this action eases Obama’s discomfiture or intensifies it.

To be sure, Obama’s shilly-shallying in itself marks quite a shift from his previous official stance. Israel’s earlier disclosure that sarin gas was used in Syria, was a source of perceptible annoyance in Washington, where the distinct preference was to keep the inconvenient truth under wraps. Hence progress was discernible in the very admission that America’s intelligence community believed with “varying degrees of confidence” that the chemical nerve agent was used by Assad.

Of course Obama isn’t the only statesman who has perfected the art of spouting evasive verbiage even when seemingly putting an end to evasion.

British Prime Minister David Cameron is no less of a consummate master. Speaking recently on a BBC breakfast show, Cameron seemed to agree with Obama about the use of gas being a “red line” in Syria, but get a load at what he actually said. “It is very disturbing what we are seeing. It’s limited evidence but there’s growing evidence that we have seen the use of chemical weapons, probably by the regime,” he intoned. “It is extremely serious, this is a war-crime, and we should take it very seriously.”

And since “this is extremely serious, I think what President Obama said was absolutely right – that this should form for the international community a red line for us to do more.”

Huh?

No worry. Cameron elucidated further: “”I have always been keen for us to do more. We are working with the opposition. We want our allies and partners to do more with us to shape that opposition to make sure we are supporting people with good motives who want a good outcome, to put pressure on that regime so we can bring it to an end.”

However, Cameron rules out armed intervention: “I don’t want to see that and I don’t think that is likely to happen, but I think we can step up the pressure on the regime, work with our partners, work with the opposition in order to bring about the right outcome… We need to go on gathering this evidence and also to send a very clear warning to the Syrian regime about these appalling actions.”

To cut the run-on rigmarole short, Assad may have a lot to lose sleep over but it’s not about intervention from Messrs. Obama, Cameron et al. They’ll continue talking the talk but they don’t really want to walk the walk.

Ostensibly it’s because of the Bush Administration’s alacrity to invade Iraq in 2003 on the pretext of WMD stockpiling by Saddam Hussein. Since no such arsenals were found, extra circumspection is now mandated to ascertain the use of forbidden chemicals by Assad.

But that’s disingenuous hokum.

A decade ago George Bush latched on to any excuse to remove Saddam even without conclusive substantiation. Today firm evidence exists against Assad but Obama will latch onto any excuse to avoid removing Assad.

That said, for once, Obama hasn’t got it all wrong.

Ruthless as Assad is, his downfall would turn Syria and adjacent lands into uncontrollable battlegrounds between his warring would-be successors – all of them the most nefarious of Islamic fanatics, be they Iranian proxies or al-Qaida surrogates. The lot of hapless noncombatants would hardly be improved. Politically incorrect as it is to say so, the mutual attrition now of pro- and anti-Assad combatants probably benefits America, Britain, Israel and the entire Free World. It’s the same as the mutual bloodletting between Iran and Iraq was in the 1980s.

Anything else is a choice between the devil we know and a whole host of even more dreadful demons who aspire to replace him. This is where the West’s hypocritical affectation gets in the way. The obsessive humanitarian posturing and fixated pretense of scrutinizing hypothetical red lines can in themselves bring on nothing less than colossal calamity.

Why? Because Assad isn’t the region’s lone villain. Other bad-guys are keeping close tabs on the international reaction to Assad’s excesses. The more sanctimonious the pronouncements from abroad, the greater the expectation that that they’d prompt punitive action. When nothing of the sort materializes, however, an unambiguous message is sent to Tehran’s ayatollahs. They can rest assured that no American military option exists against their nuke production.

In other words, talking the talk is downright dangerous. The greater the anti-Assad verbal offensive, the more it underscores the absence of a military offensive. Intently vigilant, the Iranians can doubtless be impressed with US inertia.

The only constructive course of action for Obama is to tone down his insincere anti-Assad rhetoric and to quit sounding the identical refrain for both Syria and Iran. The same goes for smug EU pontificators. The scarcity of even nominal semantic differentiation between the dissimilar Tehran and Damascus dangers should ring the loudest alarm bells for all Israelis.

The bleak signal to us is that the Iranian threat to “wipe the Zionist entity off the map” will be treated as indolently and as dishonestly as the internecine Syrian slaughter is. There will be the same pompous oratory accompanied by the same search for yet more irrefutable verification. The smoking gun for Iranian duplicity will never be found, unless – heaven forefend – in the fallout of an atomic mushroom.

In the immortal words of yesteryear’s conscientious sergeant: “come back to us only after the boys actually kill you.”

Indisputably, no national collective can afford the lackadaisical lunacy of waiting till after its own death. Definitive proof supplied by our demise would be of little use to us posthumously. The unavoidable bottom line for a sovereign state can only be self-reliance. No one else will come to our aid, not when it still matters.

Some things never change. It may be an inconvenient truth but what was, still is. We still upset the fine sensibilities of European and American self-styled adjudicators of international morality. To paraphrase Weizmann, the Jewish state’s squawks about Iranian nuclear designs “are regarded as provocation. Our very refusal to subscribe to our own death sentence becomes a public nuisance.”

Take, for example, the analogy that Kerry drew between the Boston bombing victims and the thugs who were killed in a violent battle aboard the Mavi Marmara as a result of Turkey’s 2010 provocative attempt to breach Israel’s maritime blockade on Gaza.

Even the ultra-unfriendly UN had pronounced that blockade eminently legitimate.

True, Israel quasi-apologized but that was due to American pressure and not the rights and wrongs of the case. Realpolitik considerations eclipsed the truth and had overridden our national honor. Nonetheless, that still doesn’t render the heavily armed and pugnacious Turks as innocent as the eight-year-old child and the two young women murdered near the marathon finish line. They merely cheered on the runners. They didn’t provoke, nab, bludgeon, stab or seek to kill anyone.

But what’s a crucial difference vis-à-vis diplomatic manipulation? And so Kerry solemnly informed the press at an Istanbul news conference recently that he sympathized with the pain of those who lost loved ones on the Marmara. This, he stated, was particularly so in light of the bomb attacks in his home city of Boston.

“I have just been through the week of Boston and I have deep feelings for what happens when you have violence and something happens and you lose people that are near and dear to you. It affects a community, it affects a country. We’re very sensitive to that,” Kerry assured his Turkish audience in reference to the Mavi Marmara.

But “sensitive” is hardly the adjective to describe the moral equivalence which Kerry constructed. Grossly “insensitive” is more like it. The only thing which the Boston victims and the Mavi Marmara’s aggressors had in common is death.

If Kerry’s premise is that all loss of life is the same, regardless of context and circumstances, then he might as well have extended his heartfelt condolences to the parents of Tamerlan Tsarnaev who cold-heartedly murdered the marathon spectators. After all, he, too, is dead and his folks must be unhappy. They perceive themselves as the aggrieved party and blame the American government for a conspiratorial plot – just as the Turks blame Israel.

The aggressor posing as the victim doesn’t create a valid parallel.

It doesn’t stand to reason that Kerry is so obtuse as to not realize the difference between innocent victims and belligerent attackers. His analogy is plainly loaded with hypocrisy. There’s no gentler way to put it. It is what it is.

To be sure, Kerry’s bogus sensitivity is by no means the only insincerity which reactions to the terrorist outrage in Boston have highlighted.

When Israeli innocents are targeted, there is never any comparable outpouring of compassion and commiseration, even when young children are callously cut down. Indeed, their ages and identities are rarely mentioned. They are depersonalized and referred to as faceless “Israelis” or as generic individuality-deficient “settlers.”

The impression is that they vaguely somehow had it coming for being where they were, while Bostonians don’t deserve similar atrocities. The fact of course is that nobody anywhere deserves to be targeted by barbaric zealots. But at best this is only acknowledged in fleeting lip-service. Most often, when it comes to Israel, even that pretence is missing.

The London Marathon, which followed hot on the heels of its ill-fated Boston forerunner, provides a cogent case in point. It was touching to see thousands of participants, donning black ribbons, uphold 30-seconds of silence in memory of the Boston victims. It was a fitting and poignant gesture.

But when London hosted the 2012 Olympics just months earlier, the very notion of a minute’s silence to commemorate the Israeli sportsmen slain by Fatah terrorists 40 years ago at the Munich Olympics was nixed.

True, the shock over the Boston outrage was fresh. Moreover, different organizers are responsible for each of the two London events. Yet even so, the underlying impression suggests that there are those who deserve sympathy and others who deserve it less or not at all. Still back in 1972, when the savagery in Munich was played out before the entire watching world, it was hard to avoid implicit insinuations that Israelis are pesky spoilsports who disrupt everything.

Last summer, International Olympics Committee President Jacques Rogge unmistakably bristled with annoyance at Israeli killjoys as he refused to budge on the homage to the Israeli Olympians. Driving the point home, Rogge insisted that he “cannot politicize the Olympics.” He declared: “We feel that the Opening Ceremony is an atmosphere that is not fit to remember such a tragic incident.”

In actual fact Rogge never passed up an opportunity to appease the Arabs, lest they launch a boycott or worse. And the Arabs understood and expressed appreciation for the Olympic Committee’s capitulation.

Fatah honcho Jibril Rajoub, chairman of the Palestinian Olympic Committee and the Palestinian Football Association, phrased it thus in his thank-you message to Rogge: “Sport is a bridge for love, unification and for spreading peace among the nations, and it must not be a cause for divisiveness and for the spreading of racism.”

Rajoub cloyingly ticked all the de rigueur boxes of the sentimental claptrap that has become the hallmark of progressive prattle. He after all came out for “love” and “unification” and against “divisiveness” and “racism.”

Clearly, if we take Rajoub’s reaffirmation of goodwill to all men to its logical conclusion, we’re bound to infer that the brutal massacre smack dab during the Munich Olympics was praiseworthy. For those who forget, German neo-Nazis provided logistical support, while the bloodbath was bankrolled by Mahmoud Abbas, today’s purportedly moderate president of the Palestinian Authority.

Obviously the murder of the 11 Israelis (replete with the torture and mutilation so frequently practiced by Arab “freedom fighters” under assorted monikers for the past century and half) underpinned the “bridge for love,” underscored “unification” and “spread peace among the nations.” However, as per Rajoub’s lofty broadmindedness, remembering the victims of Arab atrocities is tantamount to “a cause for divisiveness and for the spreading of racism.”

Bottom line: Murder is good. Remembrance is bad.

Far from Rajoub’s milieu, a calculated reluctance to retain information and rationally face up to reality has almost become official policy. This is especially so when a given reality is incompatible with popularly promoted multiculturalism and political correctness.

This isn’t just harmless self-delusion. Down the line, PC posturing facilitates terrorism. It breeds an assumption that everyone is as well-meaning as Western liberals. The PC mindset allows liberal values and wishful thinking to supersede common sense.

Accordingly, American security personnel will harass elderly European nuns at airports rather than check Mideasterners who mustn’t be offended. And so, not to cause excessive offense, the warnings of foreign governments aren’t dealt with seriously and aren’t relayed to local law enforcement agencies.

In the name of tolerance, the intolerant ramblings of religious radicals are pooh-poohed. Tamerlan Tsarnaev was within his rights to proclaim that Jews are pigs who deserve to be slaughtered, but it’s unseemly for such hate-mongering to raise red flags and prompt extra vigilance.

It wasn’t that Tamerlan passed under America’s radar but that the radar was mulishly averted away from him in the hope that things wouldn’t go too wrong.

And when they do go horribly wrong, as at the Boston Marathon, broadminded public opinion is stunned and can’t fathom why. It’s as if closing one’s eyes to evil should make evil go away. When evil fails to obligingly cooperate with high-minded expectations, there is dazed disbelief.

It’s hard to digest the fact that malevolence persists even in benevolent settings. The American perception is that America’s heterogeneous society is inherently welcoming and munificent. Immigrants, therefore, should be grateful and loyal. But this hypothesis presumes that all immigrants equally exude appreciation and goodwill.

Hence it’s uncool to broach the possibility that some Muslim newcomers – and even their American-reared descendents – don’t want to integrate, that they aim to conquer and dominate rather than blend in.

In 2009, Fort Hood shooter, US Army psychiatrist Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, shouted “Allahu Akbar” while spraying bullets all around him. Nevertheless, the Obama administration preferred not to categorize the slaying of 13 and the wounding of 30 others as act of terrorism motivated by Islamic fervor. It classified the mass homicide as “workplace violence.”

This was despite the fact that a Joint Terrorism Task Force had been aware of email communications between Hasan and the Yemen-based fanatic cleric Anwar al-Awlaki. Hasan’s intensifying radicalization had been apparent for several years but it was socially taboo to squawk and certainly to monitor.

Another al-Awlaki protégé was the “underwear bomber,” Nigerian Muslim Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. His own father had tipped off the CIA about him but Abdulmutallab’s name wasn’t added to the American No-Fly List, nor was his US visa ever revoked. This enabled him to almost murder 289 passengers on board a Detroit-bound Northwestern flight shortly after Hasan’s exploit.

Similarly, there was knee-jerk predisposition to belittle recurring Russian advisories to both the FBI and CIA about Tamerlan’s extremist links and overlook his infatuation with al-Awlaki and another incendiary cleric, Feiz Muhammad. Later, of course, after the Tsarnaev brothers placed bombs at the feet of children, there was wholesale sanctimonious bewilderment about their motives.

But on White House orders vocabulary like “jihad” or “Islamic terror” has been erased from America’s official lexicon.

Holding on to a convenient untruth becomes preferable to facing the unsightly truth. This inclination becomes all the more pronounced abroad in regard to Israel, whose self-defense was equated by Kerry with the Boston bombers’ handiwork.

This isn’t merely dishonest. It’s a moral failure.

Double-standards toward Israel won’t keep America safe from predations. They’ll only embolden the jihadists. Kerry would do well to learn and memorize Chaim Weizmann’s wake-up call to Anthony Eden after Kristallnacht:

“The fire from the synagogues may easily spread to Westminster Abbey…. It means the beginning of anarchy and the destruction of the basis of civilization. The powers which stand looking on, without taking measures to prevent the crime, will one day be themselves visited by severe punishment.”

Yet shamefully too few – even among us – are at all aware of it. As time goes by, the numbers only dwindle.

April 26, 1948 was shaping up to be quite a dismal day. The single exception was the fact that on that day the IZL (Irgun Zvai Leumi) and the large Labor-led Hagana signed a cooperation agreement whereby the Irgun undertook to carry out only missions beforehand authorized by the Hagana, as well as to assume whatever operational roles the Hagana would assign it.

The evening of April 26 was particularly wretched for Menachem Begin. In his role as IZL commander he had decided to halt the Irgun’s attack on Jaffa’s Manshiyeh quarter, then already in its second ill-fated day.

Mounting casualties and bleak assessments had outweighed the Hagana’s green light to continue the offensive. A grim Begin explained to his men:

“Were it not for the British tanks and armored vehicles, we could have achieved our objectives. But the tanks are there, and we cannot ignore their presence… We will hold on to the line we had reached and leave a strong advance guard there for days to come. The other units will be withdrawn… This is no failure. The combined power of the enemy is many times greater than ours… I don’t think we should continue bashing our heads against strongholds reinforced by British tanks.”

It was less than three weeks before David Ben-Gurion would proclaim Israel independent but the Arabs were already plotting their invasion of the yet-to-be-born state. On that April 26 Transjordan’s King Abdullah announced belligerently that “The only way left for us is war. I will have the pleasure and honor to save Palestine.”

“Saving Palestine” was the euphemistic code phrase for annihilating the Jews of embryonic Israel. Others were more explicit. Five days after Abdullah’s crowing, Arab League Secretary-General Abdul-Rahman Azzam Pasha declared: “If the Zionists dare establish a state, the massacres we would unleash would dwarf anything which Genghis Khan and Hitler perpetrated.”

Lest any doubt linger, Azzam reiterated his message two weeks later, just as seven Arab armies began assaulting day-old Israel: “This will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades.”

Azzam’s bluster was intended to instill fear but, by any objective criteria, there indeed was plenty to fear.

The Arabs had vehemently rejected the November 29, 1947 UN Partition Resolution that would have created Jewish Israel and Arab Palestine side-by-side in this country. They weren’t interested in a Palestinian state. They wanted to destroy the projected Jewish state, although it was granted only disjointed and quite untenable territorial mini-shreds.

Even stunted and inherently unsustainable Jewish statehood couldn’t be tolerated by those who now portray themselves as Israel’s hapless victims. From pre-dawn on November 30, they instigated a relentless bloodletting throughout the land. They also began urging local Arabs to flee temporarily to make way for the invading Arab armies.

Haifa became a focal point for this plan. In the wake of unremitting carnage by Arab snipers, saboteurs and marauders, the Hagana took control of the city on April 22 – after barely 24 hours of warfare. The Arab flight had begun.

On April 26 the US Consul General in Haifa, Aubrey Lippincott, reported to the State Department that “Local Mufti-dominated leaders were urging all Arabs to leave the city.” He was referring to Mufti Haj Amin el-Husseini, the infamous Nazi-collaborator and fomenter of anti-Jewish atrocities since 1920.

Also on the very same April 26 Haifa District Headquarters of the British Palestine Police informed Police HQ in Jerusalem that “every effort is being made by the Jews to persuade the Arab populace to stay and carry on with their normal lives, to get their shops and businesses open and to be assured that their lives and interests will be safe.”

But it was all to no avail and about to be replicated in Jaffa, although on April 26 no one in neighboring Tel Aviv dared hope that the Manshiyeh menace would soon disappear.

As in Haifa, Tel-Avivians suffered nonstop aggression following the adoption of the UN Partition Resolution. Worst of all was the indiscriminate sniping from Jaffa’s Turkish-constructed Hassan Bek mosque in the Manshiyeh Quarter that bordered on Tel Aviv.

Anyone who moved in the nearby streets of Tel Aviv was in the marksmen’s sights and there was no telling when and where the next shot would claim a victim. Just crossing the street for the most mundane of reasons entailed a life and death risk.

The mosque’s minaret, it needs to be stressed, was used to take potshots at Tel Avivian passersby before Israeli sovereignty could be blamed for a Palestinian Nakba (catastrophe – The Arab moniker for Israel’s establishment) and before Israel could be internationally demonized as ruthless occupier.

My mother often recalled the mortal peril entailed in venturing out to the corner grocery. She herself was almost injured by rifle fire on her way to the dentist.

A couple of afternoons after that dental appointment, her landlord, Mr. Braun, buttonholed my mother at the entrance to his apartment house on 7 Aharonson Street. Standing in the doorway he lectured her sternly about the foolhardiness of her sorties outdoors. Just then a bullet whistled by. Mr. Braun fell dead at my mother’s feet.

It’s more than likely that opinion-molders the world over don’t know about Mr. Braun, who was himself a refugee from Nazi Germany. But the truth is that Hassan Bek’s gunmen didn’t care about the identity of their numerous random victims. It helps their progeny’s predatory propaganda not to mention that and to keep pretending that Jaffa didn’t continuously attack Tel Aviv, that peaceable Jaffans were dispossessed arbitrarily in villainous circumstances devoid of context.

The context is that Tel Aviv bled profusely. About 1200 “hits” were reported in less than five months, among them over 160 fatalities.

In addition, with the Arab invasion in the offing, it was clear that the Egyptian army would proceed directly along the coastline from Gaza to Jaffa. Jaffa Port could have become a vital Egyptian beachhead. Vanguard Iraqi combatants had already arrived and were embedded in Jaffa.

The IZL planned to cut off Manshiyeh in order to thereby end the sharpshooting and preempt the invaders. Preparations were underway throughout April, most significantly via intrepid Irgun raids on British camps and weapons transports in which guns and munitions were commandeered.

Then 600 Irgun fighters assembled in Ramat Gan, crossed Tel Aviv westward to the Manshiyeh boundary and launched their incursion in the wee hours of April 25.

But Jaffa’s strength was underestimated. Contrary to fraudulent Arab narratives of nonviolent Jaffans overwhelmed by mighty Jewish ogres, the truth was that the Irgun detachments were puny in comparison to the far superior well-armed Arab forces and that bitter fighting ensued. The two Irgun companies sent into Manshiyeh had to retreat under heavy fire.

Political foes couldn’t contain their gloating and merciless backbiting. Ha’aretz accused the Irgun of trying to garner prestige by emulating the Hagana feat in Haifa. The Labor daily Davar derided the “Jaffa joke,” while the Marxist al-Hamishmar decried “the great provocation and shame.”

The next day, April 26, started out even worse. Sappers were sent out to blow up key strategic structures but their success was partial and the infantry units couldn’t hold on to these sites. They were greeted by machine guns, British armored vehicles and British anti-tank shelling. For the first time since November, the British were actively intervening in actual combat.

It was then that Begin decided to essentially call it quits. He thought it the only prudent move, one that would save lives. But what he didn’t expect was sweeping and uncompromising grassroots opposition.

The fighters, who had lost comrades and were themselves directly in harm’s way, refused to pull back and demanded “another chance.” It came close to a mutiny and Begin couldn’t overcome the defiance of his own troops. The high regard for him notwithstanding, he failed to impose his considered ruling, which the men on the frontline saw as an admission of defeat.

The looming insubordination in the ranks on April 26 forced Begin to rethink and approve new tactics for April 27.

Luckily for him his chief operations officer, Amichai “Gidi” Paglin, was endowed with rare resourcefulness – evident in the masterminding of such exploits as the bombing of Jerusalem’s King David Hotel and the Acre Prison break.

Paglin reckoned that progress through the narrow streets was impossible, so he suggested advancing inside Manshiyeh’s buildings – many of which were attached in long rows – by demolishing interior connecting walls. Wherever movement through open terrain couldn’t be avoided, sandbag barriers would be quickly erected.

In the dead of April 26’s night, thousands of sandbags were filled and moved to the front as were sledgehammers, crowbars, pickaxes and any conceivable masonry-busting implements. The actual attack began next day, in mid-afternoon. This time it worked and Arab fortifications crumbled, despite unstinting British assistance. By early daylight on April 28 Israel’s flag was hoisted over the terrifying Hassan Bek Mosque. Manshiyeh was in Irgun hands.

At that point the foremost lesson of April 26 became self-evident: willpower can conquer all odds.

No matter how discouraging things look, no matter how much bellicosity boastful enemies bellow, no matter how much cynical deceit is disseminated, no matter how much media pundits jeer, one single episode of dogged determination can overturn all gloomy forecasts and literally change the course of history.

We are incomparably better off today than the Irgun fighters were on that fateful April 26 when their battle seemed lost, but we still sorely need their gritty never-say-die resolve.

Jordan, it needs to be stressed, is formally at peace with Israel.

Hence the implicit message from Amman is disconcerting in the extreme. Purported representatives of public opinion showed us where their hearts are, regardless of whether the massacre-perpetrator stays behind bars or not.

Surely even the minimally fair-minded must agree that the March 13, 1997, cold-blooded shooting of Israeli schoolgirls is as heinous a crime of hate as imaginable.

There should be no equivocation here.

In the wake of the 1994 Israel-Jordan peace treaty, the confluence of the Jordan and Yarmouk rivers, (Naharayim – two rivers in Hebrew) was reserved as a tourist site and named optimistically “the Island of Peace.” It was under Jordanian sovereignty but developed and maintained by several Israeli kibbutzim. It was ironically there that a Jordanian corporal, Ahmed Daqamseh, opened fire on Israeli children from Beit Shemesh during their school outing.

He killed seven 13-year-old girls and wounded others.

Daqamseh was sentenced to seven life terms, which in the Jordanian context means 25 years in prison. Yet he is far from being disowned and condemned by his compatriots.

The reverse is true. There has been continued overt and vociferous agitation for his release and he is often outrightly celebrated as a hero. Distressingly, King Abdullah keeps mum.

Two years ago then-justice minister Hussein Mjali didn’t hesitate to hector blatantly for an immediate release and to portray the cowardly killer of young girls as a laudable role model.

Now and then Jordan informally promises that no release is being contemplated, but these soothing messages are relayed in whispered tones behind the scenes, almost furtively. The impression is that a bold statement would run afoul of the predominant public sentiment.

This is far from incidental and attests to unsettling trends in the monarchy, which has obviously come a very long way away from the contrition so compellingly expressed immediately after the homicide by King Hussein.
Israelis haven’t forgotten his gesture of humane humility when he came here personally and visited each of the bereaved families.

Hussein’s son Abdullah, the current king, has plainly failed to emulate his father and speak up forthrightly and fearlessly in the name of common decency. We have no way of ascertaining whether Hussein in his day indeed accurately reflected the mood of his people, but he certainly tried to change perceptions for the good. This trend appears to have been effectively reversed.

The very fact that Abdullah at all countenanced Mjali’s appointment as justice minister in 2011 was mind-boggling. Mjali after all served as Daqamseh’s attorney during his trial, and hence his predisposition was no unknown quotient to begin with. It should have been no surprise that he’d be the blusterous chief speaker at a demonstration for Daqamseh’s release.

The signal to public opinion in Jordan and beyond was particularly troubling. The grassroots was encouraged to revere Daqamseh.

Jordan’s powerful Islamist movement and the country’s 14 trade unions, with more than 200,000 members, relentlessly campaign for Daqamseh’s release. Against this background, the support expressed for Daqamseh by an overwhelming majority of Jordanian legislators is no bolt from the blue.

Moreover, Daqamseh is no chastened penitent. He told a Jordanian weekly that “if I could return to that moment, I would behave exactly the same way. Every day that passes, I grow stronger in the belief that what I did was my duty.”

His mother told Al Jazeera: “My son assured me he has no regrets… He said: The only thing that angers me is that the gun didn’t work properly. Otherwise I would have killed everyone there.”

Abdullah won’t secure his position by letting this genie out of the bottle. Instead of appeasing the voices of hate, he should educate the masses to reject hate. He ought to courageously embrace his father’s inspirational heritage.

In a recent op-ed, Hass justified – indeed glorified – the targeting of Jews by Arabs who hurl rocks at passing Israeli vehicles. There’s no doubt where her loyalties and sympathies reside. “Throwing stones is the birthright and duty of anyone subject to foreign rule. Throwing stones is an action as well as a metaphor of resistance,” she wrote. Nowhere did Hass mention the historical progression and context that produced what she habitually disparages as Israeli “occupation.”

This is no surprise. Hass, reared in an orthodox communist home, had long ago crossed the lines not only in abstract terms. She resides in Ramallah, having previously made her home in Gaza (but that became uncomfortable and unsafe, given the illiberal nature of Gaza’s Hamas warlords).

For the most part, the usual hodgepodge of Israel-bashers overseas avidly amplifies Hass’s every word. Her diatribes, however, barely resonate inside Israel except among small cliques of local ultra-radicals. But her stirring defense of rock-hurlers did succeed in setting off an uncommon hullabaloo.

For one thing, her piece appeared the day after Waal al-Arjeh, the stone-thrower who hit Asher Palmer’s car in 2011, was convicted of murdering the young father and his one-year-old son, Yonathan. The judges determined that, contrary to forgiving attitudes by predisposed news-slanters, rocks can be lethal weapons. Palmer lost control of his car and was killed in the resultant crash as was the baby – a mere 17 days past his first birthday.

Another toddler, Adelle Biton, is now comatose and in critical condition after a rock struck the car in which she, her two sisters and mother were riding last month. Adelle’s mother, Adva, invited Hass to “come to the Intensive Care Unit, see my Adelle, a three-year-old child, connected to tubes. Come experience with me what I am dealing with. Amira, a rock does not distinguish between different people’s blood, and not between an adult and a three-year-old. A rock kills. A rock is a murder weapon for all intents and purposes.”

But Hass is a seasoned political warrior and in all likelihood impervious to any pain that doesn’t serve the causes she propagandizes. In her universe, the fault for the tragedies of tiny Yonathan and Adelle – and too many others – rests with their parents and official Israel. The tots just shouldn’t have been where they were, Hass would surely aver.

Nor is she likely to be swayed by the fact that the Yesha (Judea and Samaria) Council had demanded that Hass be indicted for incitement. Quite the contrary. She is likely to posture as the Jeanne d’Arc of free speech, despite the fact that Israel’s Left clamors for the prosecution of any oddball who dares opine in the other extreme. Its persistent drive to try Rabbi Yitzhak Shapira for his obscure 2009 Torat Hamelech, a scholarly treatise on the religious rules of warfare, is a prime case in point.

Moreover, Hass didn’t merely extol stone-throwing but took the Palestinian Authority to task for not making practical anti-Israel attrition tactics part of the formal school curriculum.

“It would make sense for Palestinian schools to introduce basic classes in resistance,” Hass advised the PA. In an accusative tone she argued that such instruction isn’t offered “due to inertia, laziness, flawed reasoning, misunderstanding and the personal gains of some parts of society.”

She recommends that “various forms of steadfastness and resisting the foreign regime, as well as its rules and limitations, should be taught and developed.” Thereby, Hass figures, Palestinian youths could be discouraged from aiming at Jewish children – not that anyone has yet come up with a reliable method to rapidly ascertain the age groups among a given moving vehicle’s passengers.

But no such fine points bother Hass or her backers in the increasingly anti-Zionist Ha’aretz. That’s where Hass particularly resembles the Luxemburg prototype.

To inveterate ideologues like Rosa, Zionism was anathema. Although reviled by Germans as a contemptible generic Jew (with her revolutionary doctrines falsely ascribed to all Jews), Rosa’s antipathy to Jewish causes was a near-boastful expression of alienation from her own Jewish roots.

In 1917 she wrote her friend Mathilde Wurm a harsh response to the latter’s concern about pogroms. “I have no room in my heart for Jewish suffering,” Rosa declared outright. “Why do you pester me with Jewish troubles? I feel closer to the wretched victims of the rubber plantations of Putumayo or the Negroes in Africa… I have no separate corner in my heart for the ghetto.”

Rosa’s indifference to her own people arose from the intuition that cutting the cords of disagreeable Jewish affiliations eases acceptance beyond the ghetto. This was Rosa’s ticket to citizen-of-the-world credentials – even if only within the setting of her Marxist milieu, packed paradoxically with her own breed of estranged Jews.

No less paradoxically, her professed lack of solidarity with fellow Jews flourishes remarkably in the Jewish homeland – the creation of the very Zionist movement to which Rosa was the antithesis. Logically, this country ought to be the last place in which to expect Jewish self-loathing. After all, Zionism regarded itself as the remedy to Rosa-syndrome complexes.

But the Zionist cure is perhaps of limited effectiveness against the collective mental aberrations which 2000 years of exile, helplessness and dependence on the whims of diverse potentates and tyrants inculcated in downtrodden Jews. Rosa’s keenness to bask in the warmth of socialist comradeship still abounds among all-too-many Israelis. For them too, distancing themselves from the inherent interests of the Jewish people purchases a voucher for universalist endorsement.

This mindset long predated actual Jewish self-determination. As in the Hass episode, in its more extreme manifestations this inclination didn’t merely involve apathy toward the tribulations of fellow Jews but also meant active collaboration with the enemies of the Jews.

This was already so before the pretext of “resisting occupation” at all came to be. Even Jewish independence hadn’t yet been declared, couldn’t be seized upon as a casus belli and misrepresented as the Palestinian nakba (catastrophe – the loaded Arabic moniker for Israel’s sovereignty).

Then as now, whenever the Left goes on the warpath it’s ostensibly for peace, justice and virtue. Its self-acclaimed high-mindedness inevitably rationalizes any means, as it did immediately following the start in April 1936 of the blood-soaked three-year cycle of Arab-perpetrated pogroms. The more militant Marxists, under the aegis of the Communist Peh-Kah-Peh(PKP, the Yiddish acronym for the Palestinisheh Kommunistisheh Partai) plastered local streets with posters demanding “the repeal of the Balfour Declaration and an end to Jewish immigration.”

The PKP opposed the construction of Tel Aviv Harbor (where immigrant boats docked) and repudiated each batch of new immigration certificates issued. These were entry visas allotted very tight-fistedly by the British mandatory authorities to Jews already then desperately escaping Europe. The PKP, purportedly anti-British and anti-fascist, opposed rescuing these Jews. In that it sided with the infamous Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini who instigated the Nazi-financed carnage that was the 1936-39 “Great Arab Revolt.”

Husseini subsequently, in the role of pan-Arab prime minister, spent the war years in Berlin, where he consorted with Hitler, Himmler, Eichmann, et al. He broadcast virulent Nazi propaganda, recruited Muslims to the SS and actively foiled the rescue of any Jews, even children, during the Holocaust.

Indeed as Arab terror escalated, proof mounted of active PKP collusion with it (in incidents such as the 1936 bombing of Haifa’s Beit Hapoalim and Tel Aviv’s Fair Grounds). When Arab leaders themselves announced a brief truce in the autumn of 1936, the PKP rejected any ceasefire on the grounds that “Zionism drags Jews to hell… Zionists and imperialists alone are to blame for these days of atrocity” – much like settlers are nowadays held liable.

The anti-Zionism of the PKP evolved gradually. The party arose from the fringes of the broad-based Poalei Zion. In 1919 – coincidentally the year in which Rosa was fatally bludgeoned – the embryo faction banded as the Hebrew Socialist Workers Party. But by 1922 its rejection of Zionism became so all-encompassing that it ditched Hebrew – whose revival was core to the Zionist ethos – and reverted to Yiddish (the language which Moscow’s commissars preferred for Jews).

In 1923 the PKP castigated Zionism as “a bourgeois movement serving the interests of British imperialism” (just as the Zionist state today is castigated for purportedly serving the interests of alleged American imperialism). The party cheered the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop pact that facilitated WWII. The PKP vehemently opposed fighting the Third Reich until Hitler betrayed Stalin and attacked the USSR in 1941.

History is an irreverent matchmaker with a quirky sense of irony.

Back in pre-state days, when the PKP assumed it was abetting Marxist goals, it also inter alia furthered the fascist game plan. It’s not much different today.

The anti-Israel and pro-Arab line that Hass promotes appeals equally to anti-Israel forces on the international arena’s left and to rightist neo-Nazi outfits abroad. The rhetoric to which both supposed opposites resort when demonizing Israel is eerily similar. Hass delights them both.

She may pose as the embodiment of humane admonition and hector as the self-appointed voice of Israeli conscience. She may adopt the affectation of doing the moral thing in our name but the end result is immoral and indisputably at our expense.

Hass and her like-minded cronies in our midst aren’t held accountable and most probably never will. They are sure to continue deriding the Israeli mainstream’s disapproval of them. They will keep on deriving clout and celebrity in distant salons, campuses and media.

They’ll keep on molding foreign opinion against their own people. Like Rosa, her heirs too have no room in their hearts for Jewish suffering. Rosa’s ghost walks among them and they bow to its diktats.

Our judgment is crippled by an overpowering addiction to entertainment and news presentation constitutes merely another showbiz feature. Complexities are conveniently diluted and events of the day are offered as a packaged commodity, almost like the drugs with which the denizens of Huxley’s future medicated themselves into bliss. Shallow stimulation and immediate gratification have replaced thought and remembrance.

Cyber-wizardry only exacerbated these already preexisting inclinations. But unlike Postman, who lamented the decline of logic and knowledge, there are those who actually celebrate the loss. Foremost among them is our own president Shimon Peres, always ever-eager to lead the vanguard of what he promotes as progress.

A few years ago, for example, Peres pontificated thus: “Why is it important to know how many people Napoleon killed? …If you want details, go to the Internet.”

It was no slip of the tongue. His previous pearls of wisdom informed all and sundry that Google had “liberated us from the great effort to remember things… Why remember? The past isn’t so great. It’s full of tragedy and war… Look to the future, forget about the past… Personally, I have very little patience for history. I believe that to imagine is more important than to remember.”

It’s this upbeat hip mindset that indisputably makes Peres so popular, principally in Europe which has very vested interests in not remembering. That’s something we should keep uppermost in mind, especially during these interim days between Holocaust Remembrance Day and Remembrance Day for the fallen in Israel’s still ongoing existential struggle.

The two dates are intrinsically interconnected. The fact that they are only one week apart on our Hebrew calendar epitomizes our tragic Jewish distinctiveness.

We are called upon not to forget but this by no means guarantees a meaningful remembrance. Like all else, memory in our day and age can be devalued and distorted – reduced to crass catchphrases or warped online into fiendish misrepresentation.

The vogue in our brave new world is to cease perceiving the Holocaust and our subsequent Jewish sovereignty through Jewish eyes. The Jewish viewpoint has somehow been tainted. At best it’s scorned as narrow-minded and parochial. More severely, it’s disparaged as inexcusably nationalist if not altogether racist.

The decedents of Nazis, of Nazi-collaborators and of all the multitudes who expediently opted to see nothing, prefer that the mass-slaughter on Europe’s soil be watered down with universalist-humanist banalities.

Generalized platitudes quasi-absolve Germany. They imply that any nation anywhere and anytime might succumb to Nazi-like excesses, given sufficient socioeconomic and political provocation. Hypothetically, hardship and frustration can drag any culture into the arms of an authoritative fuehrer who would appeal to a latent dislike for “the other,” which presumably festers equally everywhere.

There supposedly was nothing which made the Jew a more probable victim (even after more than 2000 years of deliberate demonization) and nothing that made the Germans probable mass-murders on an unprecedented scale (despite centuries of a unique form of anti-Semitism that preached physical eradication).

It was just prosaic coincidence that the roles weren’t reversed. The Jews, argue moral-relativists, could just as credibly have become Nazis.

More moderate postmodern universalists, among them numerous Jewish left-wingers, translate this into a demand for Jewish atonement for potential wrongdoing. Curiously on Holocaust Remembrance Day ultra-liberal Jews beat the breasts of fellow Jews and berate them for not being morally superior enough, for not being more passive and pacifist, for not loving and forgiving their enemies more – despite the fact that these still-potent enemies still bay for Jewish blood.

The universalist lesson from the Holocaust is that Jews should defend themselves less.

The disdain for history is incontrovertible. To diminish the incomparable onus, many Germans refrain from focusing on what negates Germany’s self-serving portrayal of itself as a casualty of ruthless dictators. They rationalize away the adulation of Hitler in Germany but they can’t overlook the fact that he was worshiped by German immigrants in America, where these newcomers were free and quite safe from Storm Trooper tyranny.

The same goes for the German Templers right here in this country. They were ardent Nazis under British rule. There can be no defense for their choice to embrace Hitler next door to Tel Aviv. No coercion can be cited as a mitigating circumstance.

Germans like to depict themselves as yet another European occupied population, as having been conquered by a space alien called Hitler and his unpleasant cohorts. Hence modern Germany emphasizes the “good Germans” – chiefly those who banded together in the failed attempt to assassinate Hitler.

The only detail missing is the fact that the conspirators weren’t overly appalled by the methodical murder of Jews. Their outrage was aroused by Hitler’s mismanagement of the war and the catastrophe he thereby inflicted on the German people.

It’s no wonder that Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s tour de force, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, is the single most resented book in Germany.

Side-by-side with minimizing Germany’s stigma is the attempt to minimize what marked the Jews as the unavoidable victims. Political correctness mandates that mention of anti-Semitism be replaced by talk about a vague commonplace antipathy for “the other.” Such verbal obfuscation downplays the ancient scourge of Judeophobia.

Jews weren’t foreign in Europe and some even went to inordinate lengths to posture as “Germans of the Mosaic persuasion.” The visceral hate for even the most Germanized of Jews preceded Hitler and prepared the ground for him. Jews weren’t opportune objects of an aversion that was subsidiary to the colossal socio-political upheaval. The goal of wiping every last Jew (or even part-Jew) off the earth was primary for Hitler.

He and his henchmen persisted in their genocidal design till their very final moments, at the clear expense of Third Reich military capability. Even when all else was lost, beaten Germany continued to eradicate Europe’s leftover tortured Jews. That’s hardly comparable to sporadic massacres and inter-communal carnage anywhere.

Excluded from discussion is the fact that the hunted Jews weren’t a side to any conflict. They weren’t a combatant enemy. German Jews were loyal German patriots. They never hurled bombs at or otherwise attacked Germans. They were ordinary citizens dispossessed and sent to die. “Half-breeds” underwent rigorous investigations into their lineage and exhaustive searches were mounted for every last hidden Jewish baby.

This isn’t pedantic harping on minutiae. The selective and occasionally kitschified remembrance of the Holocaust impacts today on the Jewish state that courageously arose from the Holocaust’s ashes. Israel’s against-all-odds heroism, just three years post-Holocaust, is now defamed as a form of copycat Nazism.

The fact that Jews resolved never again to be victims is twisted into a potential crime against humanity. This is a favorite theme for Israel-bashers but also for some Jewish liberal sorts.

Those who don’t themselves turn the other cheek, urge vulnerable Israel to do just that. Those who don’t relinquish their own power, preach to us that power corrupts. Those who vilify us with knee-jerk relish, advise us to heed their “valid criticism.” They advocate we count on the international community’s unproven goodwill instead of on our own self-defense.

Those who still yearn for our destruction are fraudulently described as our hapless victims. Those who skew history don’t really want us to remember that Hitler’s Mein Kampf has been a runaway bestseller throughout the Arab world for decades. That must indicate something.

Those who dismiss history berate the preoccupation with the Arab role during the Holocaust. It surely clashes with the perverse narrative that Jewish Nazis overwhelmed peace-loving Arabs. It serves the lie to expunge from recollection the fact that the newborn Jewish state was surrounded by enemies who sought to complete what Hitler failed to. These enemies said so openly and blusterously. They never tried to disguise their aims.

In their effort to defeat renascent Israel, they even imported Muslim Bosnian mercenaries – veterans of the Handzar SS Division recruited by the infamous Haj Amin el-Husseini during WWII.

The agents of amnesia don’t want it remembered that many of the fallen soldiers we commemorate on the eve of our Independence Day gave their lives to thwart the world’s last organized neo-Nazi armies in 1948, that Arab states sheltered fleeing Nazi war-criminals and that Nazi scientists sought to furnish the Arabs with doomsday weapons against the Jewish state.

Untrendy as it doubtless is, reminding the world over and over that visceral Arab enmity predated so-called occupation, predated Jewish statehood and predated even the Holocaust – and indeed that it contributed crucially to the unparalleled tragedy of European Jewry – becomes an imperative rather than an esoteric fixation.

Purportedly blameless local Arabs idolized the Nazis since the 1930s, eagerly awaited Germany’s invasion of Eretz Yisrael, plotted the annihilation of its Jews and all their brethren throughout the Mideast, hoarded arms, spied for Field Marshal Erwin Rommel and even named their children after him. Decades later there were still many Arabs here with Hitler, Eichmann and Rommel for first names.

El-Husseini, was immensely popular in his day and avidly followed by the Arab masses. He’s still revered. As Nazism’s enthusiastic accomplice and as president of “the Pan-Islamic Congress,” he resided in wartime Berlin, was appointed SS-Gruppenfuehrer by Himmler and dubbed “the Arab fuehrer” by Hitler himself. After WWII he was declared a wanted war-criminal.

His escapades are too many to be elaborated here. Suffice it to say that his hands dripped with Jewish blood.

All this is camouflaged by Holocaust-deniers from Mahmoud Ahmedinejad to “peace-partner” Mahmoud Abbas. Alarmingly, though, historical truth is also unwelcome for growing numbers of self-professed liberals the world over. They pooh-pooh the threat to our lives and warn us against transmuting into Hitlerian ogres. The very notion of Jewish rights arouses instantaneous demagogic analogies with Nazism.

Had we known our history, nobody could thus mess with our minds. But we live in an age where history is too much of a bother. Amusing ourselves to death is easier.

Fearing a backlash and denying personal involvement in the case, Abbas decided to magnanimously “pardon” Hamamreh. But Abbas needn’t have feared. He is the darling of free world opinion – regardless of the incitement he promotes and the freedoms he stifles. His excesses never resonate in overseas media.

His term of office expired years ago, but he is still widely regarded as a democratically elected leader. Nonetheless, in Abbas’s pseudo-democracy all that it took to convict Hamamreh for “spreading seeds of hate” and “publishing false information” was an image shared on Facebook that likened Abbas to a Syrian TV villain.

The fact that Hamamreh did not actually do hard time is immaterial. An intimidating message was dispatched to members of the press and Internet users. They are being carefully monitored.

It is an oft-sent message. A day after Hamamreh’s sentencing, Salfit-resident Anas Ismail was convicted of “libel and slander” because he clicked “Like” on a Facebook status critical of a PA official. He was sentenced to six months.

Last February, Anas Awwad was sentenced in Nablus to a year’s imprisonment for posting a photo depicting Abbas as Real Madrid soccer player. He too was magnanimously pardoned by Abbas.

This is hardly new and hardly typical only of Abbas’s tenure. When his predecessor Yasser Arafat ruled the roost things were not different. Journalists were hounded for printing uncomplimentary photos of Arafat or for quoting him below the fold on the front page. This was considered insulting and insults are counted as crimes.

Nor are such concepts unique to the PA. They are rampant throughout the Arab realm – even in post-Arab Spring days. Thus Egypt’s prosecutor-general has ordered the arrest of the country’s best-known satirist, Bassam Youssef, for poking fun at President Mohamed Morsi. He was, meanwhile, freed on bail and an unrelated lawsuit by an Islamic attorney had been rejected.

Youssef hosts a weekly prime-time offering, El-Bernameg (“The Show”), aired each Friday on a private satellite channel. His outstanding comedic specialty is mimicking Morsi’s speech and gestures. Besides being harassed for his alleged disrespect for Morsi, Youssef is also being accused of “insulting Islam.” This is nothing to be scoffed at in a country where the Muslim Brotherhood holds sway.

The aforementioned cases are all petty, vindictive and geared more than all else to warn the citizenry and deter more serious dissenters. They all point to the abysmal absence of free expression in this region, with the marked exception much-maligned Israel.

Despite the outward trappings of democracy, this state of affairs belies the impression that our neighbors are fast internalizing the values of civil liberties. The freedoms to “Like,” upload, share, opine, report and publish are intrinsic components of the most elementary freedom of expression. No wonder it is enshrined in the First Amendment to the US Constitution.

The arbitrary manner in which anyone can be accused of injuring a leader’s honor – and the very fact that this at all constitutes a felony – is hardly conducive to fostering the public climate that would lead the populace to welcome and sustain democracy.

Defending rights is not a simple or self-evident process even in the most seasoned and stable of democracies. It becomes all the more crucial in societies where private militias and corrosive cronyism either terrorize or buy off whoever does not run with the pack.

Therefore, the perceived generosity of spirit displayed by Abbas when he deigned to pardon his “insulters” in no way mitigates the travesty of trampling on basic freedoms.

When all is said and done, what stood between persecuted Facebook users and prolonged terms behind bars was the caprice or cynical calculation of one chief.

The fact that Abbas posed as the good guy doesn’t diminish the fact that in his latifundia it is a severely punishable crime to offend him.

Abbas has not faced his electorate for a long time and elections do not anyhow on their own suffice for democracy. Without undeviating devotion to fundamental freedoms, the façade of democracy is nothing but hollow hype.

Lévy had been an avid Obama fan since 2004, gushed about him unreservedly and even crowned Obama the “Black Kennedy.” However, there’s way more that ties the two men. Obama and Lévy are both hyper-hyped photogenic trendsetters and charismatic superstars. Foremost, though, both have compelling reason to reevaluate their strongly held maxims.

Both believed in the Arab Spring, in heralding a new free-thinking and broadminded Arab orientation. Each in his own way contributed to what he trusted was a defining historic makeover.

Obama, at the helm of the world’s sole remaining superpower, helped topple old stalwarts like Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak with mere words. Lévy, a swashbuckling intellectual with no might behind him, singlehandedly goaded then-French president Nicolas Sarkozy to mount a European intervention to aid the Libyan rebels. It was quite a feat for one individual, no matter how iconic.

Lévy travelled repeatedly to strife-torn Libya, likening its rebels to the Warsaw Ghetto fighters, no less.  Sparing no hyperbole, he declared Benghazi “the capital not only of Libya but of free men and women all over the world.”

Here we need to interject that Algerian-born Lévy is by no means one of the garden-variety Israel-bashing leftist Jewish scholars who proliferate in fashionable salons and prestigious campuses. Quite the contrary. Lévy is proudly Jewish and forthrightly characterized anti-Zionism as “the new mutation of the anti-Semitism virus.”

But so entranced was he by the Libyan insurrection, that he chastised Israel for its skepticism about an overhaul of the Arab mindset.

“Exaggerated caution, withdrawal, silent disapproval,” He wrote in 2011, “would place the heirs of the great Zionist dream in an untenable position, one that would be unworthy of their history. I am hard put to see how a country can be proud – rightly so and for such a long time – of being the sole democracy in the Middle East and yet hesitate to welcome its neighbors when they attempt to join it, embracing, at the cost of heroic combat, the values Israel has exemplified.”

Shortly thereafter, Lévy told Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu that Libya’s opposition leaders will establish diplomatic ties with Israel should they come to power.

A mere two days later, the self-same rebels released a communiqué that “strongly rejects what has been reported in some media as Mr. Bernard Lévy’s comments on the future relationship between Libya and the Israelis.”

It was a slap in the face but Lévy wasn’t disheartened. Likewise, Obama appears not to have been overly disheartened by copious evidence that the much-ballyhooed Arab swing to liberal values was no more than a cynical façade for a takeover by the distinctly illiberal forces of Islamic fanaticism.

During his charm offensive here, Obama spoke of American support for “the Egyptian people in their historic transition to democracy,” seemingly in total oblivion of the very counter-democratic course of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi.

He further asserted that “the United States continues to work with allies and friends and the Syrian opposition to hasten the end of Assad’s rule.” He just failed to mention that in opposition-held areas, women are compulsorily confined to their homes in keeping with strict Muslim edicts, while public lashings have been adopted as due punishment for an assortment of religious transgressions.

That said, despite his reluctance to confess his critical errors of perception and policy, Obama did indicate awareness that things aren’t truly going to plan. In one candid second, during his joint press conference with Netanyahu, Obama did own up that “obviously what was already a pretty tough neighborhood has gotten tougher.” In other words, much as he’s loath to admit it, he knows that the Arab Spring made things worse rather than better.

In the final analysis, even Obama must realize that America’s only constant and reliable ally in this corner of the globe is the tiny Jewish state, which he studiously excluded from his overseas excursions itinerary during his first White House stint.

All around Israel, synthetic nations, concocted by British and French imperialists last century, have now dismally disintegrated into tribal, religious and sectarian components. The Middle East was reduced to bedlam.

Therefore, the very fact that Obama continues to promote the two-state chimera is unsettling.  Given the madhouse chaos of this pivotal region, the cause of world peace would not be served by the introduction of yet more anarchic players in the shape of a sovereign Palestine and an insurgent Jordan.

All that allows Ramallah figurehead Mahmoud Abbas to parade as a peace-partner is the fact that Israel props him up. The same goes for King Abdullah in Amman, who would have been deposed, were it not for Israel. Both are able to posture in the international arena simply because Israel underpins them.

As soon as Israel pulls out, Hamas or kindred Islamic fundamentalists will take over. Only Israel keeps them at bay. Coercive pressure to create the Palestinian state that Obama so ostensibly yearns for, will not only harm Israel but will inescapably lead to the downfall of Israel’s purported interlocutors, chiefly Abbas (whose mandate from the voters expired years ago). The resultant mayhem will, just as inevitably, knock Jordan off balance.

Abbas anyhow, lacks courage to make a deal, which would in effect mean relinquishing the currently claimed right to inundate Israel with millions of so-called Arab refugees. Abbas cannot end the dispute with the Jewish state.

His predecessor Yasser Arafat, who didn’t lose Gaza and who wielded incomparably more clout than Abbas, feared to accept then-premier Ehud Barak’s egregiously generous offers in 2000. No wonder Abbas rebuffed an improved offer from Ehud Olmert in 2008. For Arafat’s successor, theatrical poses aside, striking a bargain is tantamount to actual suicide.

In a way, Obama gave Abbas an out in 2009. By pressuring Netanyahu to impose a ten-month moratorium on Jewish construction beyond the 1949 Armistice Line (a.k.a the Green Line), Obama supplied Abbas with a pretext to avoid even the semblance of seeking a modicum of accommodation.

Obama’s settlement freeze had swelled into Abbas’ permanent precondition. He cannot be seen as demanding less than the American president. Unwittingly, Obama has sabotaged his own pet project. He should have understood that Abbas cannot deliver.

For all of Obama’s peace preaching, a Palestinian state is not a remotely viable option because no Palestinian leader can sign on the dotted line – and that’s without even dwelling on the minor matter of squeezing Israel into an indefensible nine-mile waistline. Israel’s densest population centers would be exposed to daily battering that would make all the rocket barrages unleashed on our south by Hamas and on our north by Hezbollah look mild in comparison.

But, more often than not, public figures find it advantageous to cover up gaping flaws in their sales pitches. It’s detrimental to be seen as backing down from pious pretense and buoyant pledges to fix the world. Some fallacies, especially of the hope-stirring sort, are difficult to ditch.

Sunshine and cheer are seductive and therefore confer political perks aplenty on those who can dispense them with aplomb. Take our own indefatigable president Shimon Peres. “Peace is not only a vision but a possibility,” he intoned confidently to an appreciative Obama.

It was music to Obama’s ears. Despite everything which the Arab Spring dished up – coupled with the lethal damage he wrought to his own first-term attempts to kick-start meaningful Mideast negotiations – Obama still extolled the virtues of finding a “resolution to this issue,”  i.e. the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Such resolution, Obama responded gladly to Peres’s cue, will “enhance Israel’s security” and help Palestinians “channel their extraordinary energies and entrepreneurship in more positive ways… The entire region will be healthier…  So I’m going to keep on making that argument.”

We’ve of course heard lots such mantras before. This time, though, Obama was refreshingly cognizant of exactly how he sounds. As a result, he felt bound to stress that he says what he does “not only because of some Pollyannaish views about ‘can’t we all get along and hold hands and sing Kumbaya.’”

Regardless of how ridiculous her upbeat disposition may prove to be in the merciless glare of our Mideastern daylight, Pollyanna is always enticing – even though reality gallingly vindicates ever-irksome dire predictions. It’s natural. Optimism is sugary and promises all manner of lovely things to come. Realism (scorned as pessimism) may be bitter and warn of grim consequences that nobody wants to hear about.

And so despite his disclaimer, Obama still puts on Pollyanna airs and belts out a sappy peace-‘n’-love rendition of the stale two-state Kumbaya. Despite what he knows, or at least suspects in his heart of hearts, the show must go on.

Similarly, Lévy can’t publicly backtrack from his well-intentioned naïveté. “Have I become an undesirable in Libya?” he asks in a Daily Beast op-ed. “You can’t quite persuade yourself that ingratitude is the vice of great nations or that your friends may simply have been using you for as long as you remained useful to them.”

Nonetheless, while denying he had travel plans, Lévy isn’t sure that officials “within the Tripoli city government,” don’t indeed regard him as undesirable. He attributes this to the “the war between the two Islams,” but he concludes: “you feel strengthened in your resolve to carry on, both at home and in Libya, alongside your true Libyan friends.”

No matter how hard and insensitively reality slaps given delusionists in the face, they still compulsively persist in their charade. The world may be a tad unkind, but the optimistic sham of unwavering trust in human goodness is too good to give up.

It worked, at least for the short haul – like it did for Pal Joey in his very calculated and cynical pursuit of older-woman Vera Simpson. In the Rodgers and Hart 1940 musical adaptation of John O’Hara’s joyless book, Joey is a manipulative but charming heel. He starts out by insulting Vera but then plots with sly sentimentality to wow her. Vera, no ingénue, knows that Joey’s sweet nothings are insincere but she nevertheless surrenders to them because she loves to be loved.

Owning up to her own frailties, she belts out:

“I’m wild again,

Beguiled again,

A simpering, whimpering child again,

Bewitched, bothered and bewildered am I! …

Seen a lot.
I mean I lot,

But now I’m like sweet seventeen a lot.
Bewitched, bothered and bewildered am I!”

Too many Israelis who should have known lots better were likewise reduced to the infatuation of a bewitched, bothered and bewildered teenager.

Nothing exemplified this better than the rousing applause which followed each mention of the name “Palestine” in Obama’s hour-long showpiece speech at the Jerusalem International Convention Center.

True, his audience of mostly students was scrupulously sifted a priori and was anything but a representative sample of the Israeli aggregate. Ariel University students were shamefully barred – an affront which should have spurred fellow students into a boycott as a minimal show of solidarity. However, all the others were screened as well, assuring Obama of a friendly if bogus forum. Beside the affectation of straight-talking to the commoners, it’s obvious why the Knesset was a far less desirable option for his purposes. At least some of our parliamentarians weren’t likely to obsequiously acquiesce to the sham.

Obama was seeking out a quasi-Vera who’d be thrilled out of her mind by his attentions. It’s evident that his Israeli listeners were indeed suitably enthralled and hence the rapturous ovations at the mention of the synthetic Palestine, with which the enemies we prefer to call peace partners want to replace the Jewish state.

It’s hard to imagine that any Arab or Muslim audience anywhere would so enthusiastically acclaim the mention of Israel. But that’s only one anomaly that the supposedly critical thinkers from the halls of academe failed to consider.

There was plenty else in Obama’s efforts to make friends and influence people that shouldn’t have gone down well with Israeli students, regardless of their political orientation. It boggles the mind that any Israeli who occasionally listens to the news or glances at a newspaper didn’t feel badly stung by descriptions of how we supposedly oppress the downtrodden Palestinian masses wallowing in the misery of our occupation.

Simplistically deceptive Obama appeared to tug at the heartstrings of his captivated Israeli Vera: “The Palestinian people’s right to self-determination and justice must also be recognized. Put yourself in their shoes – look at the world through their eyes. It is not fair that a Palestinian child cannot grow up in a state of her own, and lives with the presence of a foreign army that controls the movements of her parents every single day. It is not just when settler violence against Palestinians goes unpunished. It is not right to prevent Palestinians from farming their lands; to restrict a student’s ability to move around the West Bank; or to displace Palestinian families from their home.Neither occupation nor expulsion is the answer. Just as Israelis built a state in their homeland, Palestinians have a right to be a free people in their own land.”

Obama’s crude one-dimensional assertions might indeed suffice to sway a just-landed Martian. But Israeli students should have at least experienced acute nausea.

Did Israel prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state? Did the so-called Palestinians not violently reject the UN Partition plan of 1947 geared to set up both Jewish and Arab states in this land? Did the Arab world not launch a bloody war to destroy the day-old Jewish state? Was their purpose to found a Palestinian state or to obliterate the Jewish state? Why did Obama’s long ramble include no reference to the repeated Arab onslaughts on Israel?

And why on earth was that purportedly coveted Palestinian state not created between 1948 and 1967 when Arabs held all the territory now piteously yearned for? Who impeded Palestinian self-determination for 19 whole years?

But then we get to the cloying emotional exploitation about the child, her parents, their curtailed movement, the foreign army, the frustrated farmers, the alleged displacement of families and settler violence. All this is presented detached from any context, as if it’s all factually accurate and, to boot, the product of arbitrary Israeli hardheartedness.

The absence of any causality leads to outright distortion. That’s a given always. Deep suspicions should be aroused whenever historical background is opportunely deleted. Obama may be the Israeli Vera’s darling Pal Joey but, endearing as he strove to be, he twisted and warped the truth. By dramatically reiterating Palestinian accusations, divorced conveniently from any perspective, Obama misrepresented our reality.

His Israeli listeners, though, should not be gullible saps. All of them, radical left-wingers included, know full well that until terror was unleashed in our streets, Arabs from the so-called occupied territories entered Israel utterly unhindered every day. No roadblocks or checkpoints interfered with anyone’s routine.

Things only changed when buses started exploding here, when going to the supermarket or school became perilous, when a family outing could mean gruesome carnage. But did Obama appraise Palestinian inconvenience versus Israeli lives? He knows why things are the way they are. By pretending not to be aware, he proved himself disingenuous in the extreme.

His rhetoric about settler violence is just as dishonest. Has Obama weighed the marginal misdemeanors of a minority of settlers against the officially sponsored terror worship of Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestinian Authority? Schools, the media and the mosques all glorify mass-murderers and incite to hate under Abbas’s auspices.

And, for Obama’s edification, there are no ruthless expulsions of Arab families, but there are ruthless expulsions of Jewish families. Moreover, were Obama’s wishes to come true, hundreds of thousands of Jews would be rendered homeless because they reside beyond the Green Line. This includes entire densely inhabited Jewish neighborhoods in Jerusalem.

There was more artful feigning of innocence. In apparent deadpan earnest, Obama argued: “Of course, Israel cannot be expected to negotiate with anyone who is dedicated to its destruction. But while I know you have had differences with the Palestinian Authority, I believe that you do have a true partner in President Abbas and Prime Minister Fayyad.”

Really? The adamant refusal to at all recognize the legitimacy of a Jewish state betrays the perception of Israel as a temporary, de facto entity to be Arabized in future via the influx of millions of hostile “repatriated refugees.” This doesn’t betoken peace but another route to our destruction.

And who does Abbas speak for? He has lost Gaza. His term of office in Ramallah expired years ago. He still postures only because Israel props him up. He is as much a peace partner as an effigy of our making would be.

But that’s hardly the worst of Obama’s propaganda offensive. Imagine if Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu had appeared before a gathering of hand-picked American students and appealed to them to oppose what their elected leaders consider to be the most vital existential interests of the United States?

What if Netanyahu addressed specific controversies uppermost on the US agenda? What if he dissected each issue and told the students that their leaders are wrong, that they should prod these leaders to reverse the very positions which won electoral support, that they should overrule their leaders and in effect sabotage their government’s policy? The outcry in every corner of each of the 50 states would be thunderous. In Israel, too, Netanyahu would be mercilessly pilloried. When a visiting foreign dignitary exhorts to dissent against the host country’s democratically elected government, he is rightly seen as having crossed every line of both protocol and principle.

Yet this is precisely what Obama felt free to do here when, with ostensible high-mindedness, he pontificated: “Political leaders will not take risks if the people do not demand that they do. You must create the change that you want to see.” Needless to stress, the risks are to the people’s very continued survival.

Obama’s message could not be more transparent. Without much ado he urged the students to go up against Israel’s current leadership.

Obama appeared to have forgotten that Israel’s citizenry had just reelected Netanyahu. He likewise forgot that Meretz, whose platform appears to be what Obama ardently recommends, was once again relegated to the opposition as a fringe Knesset faction. By going over the head of Israel’s new government, Obama disrespected if not disparaged our democracy.

Remarkably, there was no earsplitting outcry. Obama laid it on so thick and was so syrupy, that Israel’s proverbial Vera wasn’t going to make a fuss about her dishonor.

The only hope is that even those spellbound and mesmerized by the American president’s undisguised cajolery, will eventually come to their senses. The original Vera did. After lots of sordid twists and turns of the storyline, she ditched her delusions and changed her tune.

When it was all over she exclaimed:

“Wise at last,

My eyes at last,

Are cutting you down to your size at last.
Bewitched, bothered and bewildered no more!”