Obama’s revealing mistake

Barry Rubin is an Israeli and a serious scholar of the Middle East. See, for example, his books including The Muslim Brotherhood: The Organization and Policies of a Global Islamist Movement and The Truth About Syria. He blogs here and here.
Rubin is absolutely on fire commenting on President Obama’s Middle East speech of this past Thursday. He comments at some length in “The opposite of strategy is catastrophe” and tightens up the focus in “A big and revealing mistake that nobody has noticed.” In the latter of these two posts Rubin observes a probably mistaken attribution of responsibility for the death of Palestinian Arab girls to Israel in Obama’s juxtaposition of their deaths with that of an Israeli boy at the hands of Arab terrorists. Rubin comments:

President Obama and his colleagues don’t get the facts straight and tend to blame Israel. In other words, Obama counterposed the reaction of an Israeli father whose son was murdered by Palestinian terrorists to that of a Palestinian father whose daughters were murdered by or because of the actions of…Palestinian terrorists.
And that’s the trouble with an “even-handed” approach to the Israel-Palestinian conflict.
But, as with the Abu al-Aish case, it is the radicals who lead the Palestinian movement, several states, and the revolutionary Islamist oppositions–not Israel–are killing the peace process.
Terrorists attack Israel; Israel defends itself.

Please check both out both of Rubin’s excellent posts on Obama’s speech.

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