For years the New York Times has leaned towards support for Israel at points where a big dose of moral chutzpa has been needed to do so. It was a little bit of a surprise that the opening paragraph of a report on Obama's speech to the UN reads like this:
President Obama declared his opposition to the Palestinian Authority’s bid for statehood in the Security Council on Wednesday, throwing the weight of the United States directly in the path of the Arab democracy movement even as he hailed what he called the democratic aspirations that have taken hold throughout the Middle East and North Africa.
That pretty much gets it right. But it's a surprise. It demands that we separate (as the president himself seems to have done) the moral leader from the politician and heavy user of cosmetics.
The reporter goes on to write:
For Mr. Obama, the challenge in crafting the much-anticipated General Assembly address on Wednesday was how to address the incongruities of the administration’s position: the president who committed himself to making peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians a priority from Day one who still has not even been able to even get peace negotiations going after two and a half years; the president who opened the door to Palestinian state membership at the United Nations last year ending up threatening to veto that very membership; the president who was determined to get on the right side of Arab history ending up, in the views of many on the Arab street, on the wrong side of it on the Palestinian issue.
Obama has put himself in a lose-lose position, and I'm not even talking about the 2012 election. Rather, Obama is adapting his leadership to our decades-long separation of morality from politics. He seems pledged to become a leader who can't lead and the once-moral candidate whose morality is in question.
“We should reach for what’s best within ourselves,” Mr. Obama told the General Assembly last year. “If we do, when we come back here next year, we can have an agreement that will lead to a new member of the United Nations: an independent, sovereign state of Palestine, living in peace with Israel.”
But that was last year.
A commenter on the report has something unpleasant to consider:
If the message is that the only way for the Palestinians to find peace is by declining to stand up for themselves, constantly backing down in the face of aggression, and capitulating to their enemies at every turn, I can't imagine a better messenger to deliver that message than a man who lives it every day, President Barack Obama.
