Writing in the Jerusalem Post Monday, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) had bold words for the president and his administration’s hypocritical behavior toward Israel. Although Obama declared at the UN General Assembly last month that “the United States will never compromise our commitment to Israel’s security,” Bachmann points out his contradiction.
“The administration, contrary to public assurances that it supported Israeli-Palestinian peace talks without preconditions, pressured Israel to free jailed Palestinian terrorists to bring the Palestinian Authority to the negotiating table. This pressure is symptomatic of a larger, fundamentally flawed approach that has failed the cause of peace.”
One of those freed terrorists, explained Bachmann, was Al Haj Othman Amar Mustafa, who murdered an American and former marine, Steven Frederick Rosenfeld, in 1989.
“If it is unwise and unjust to free someone who murdered an American citizen, it is equally unwise and unjust to free someone who murdered non-American citizens.”
Bachmann’s support for Israel is a longstanding and personal passion. In her teen years, she spent a summer working on a kibbutz in the country on a mission sponsored by a Christian ministry called Young Life.
“I always had this love and appreciation for Israel because I was a Christian […] It’s the foundation of our faith. All of the Bible is about Israel.”
Now, the Minnesota representative is a member of Christians United for Israel and has visited the Jewish state several times since taking office. As her new op-ed reveals, she is not shy about expressing her displeasure in how the US has been treating its ally.
“The Obama administration has not called out this long, uninterrupted record of PA intransigence and extremism. It has, however, leaned heavily on Israel to make concessions […] This is not America at its best. Above all, it is not the America that has declared under successive presidents, including President Obama, that it will stand by Israel when faced with threats, violence, extremism and non-acceptance. Israel faces all these right now.”
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Indeed, a few of Israel’s concessions include the 1979 Israeli/Egyptian peace treaty in which the nations returned all of Sinai to Egypt and as a result of a number of other successive agreements Bachmann lists, Israel has withdrawn from over 40 percent of the West Bank and nearly 90 percent of Gaza.
“The time has come for the United States to cease pressuring Israel into unmerited, dangerous, one-sided concessions.”
Time will tell if the Obama administration listens to the representative's pleas and stops peer pressuring one of its closest friends.
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