Shapiro, Netanyahu and Oren
U.S. Ambassador Dan Shapiro, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren.Photo by Ambassador Ron Dermer
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U.S. ambassador to Israel says Michael Oren's claims about Obama 'don't reflect truth'
By Barak Ravid | Jun. 17, 2015 | 10:44 AM |  4
Michael Oren's wildly unconvincing, deeply trivial attack on Obama
By Peter Beinart | Jun. 17, 2015 | 3:29 PM |  7
Michael Oren, the problem isn't U.S. critique of Israeli policies – it's Israeli policies
By Jeremy Ben-Ami | Jun. 17, 2015 | 7:55 PM |  8
Kahlon renounces Michael Oren's claims that Obama 'abandoned' Israel
By Barak Ravid | Jun. 17, 2015 | 10:30 PM |  5
State Department rejects Michael Oren's anti-Obama claims as 'false'
By Barak Ravid | Jun. 18, 2015 | 12:21 AM |  9
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has rejected an American request to publicly disassociate himself from claims made by former Israeli Ambassador to Washington and current Kulanu MK Michael Oren accusing President Barack Obama of deliberately abandoning Israel, in an op-ed published several days ago in the Wall Street Journal.
Netanyahu told U.S. Ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro that Oren's comments did not represent the government's position. However, because Oren is not a member of his party, Netanyahu did not see it appropriate to disavow Oren's statements publicly. Netanyahu said he would weigh commenting on the matter in public eventually.
Oren was appointed by Netanyahu in 2009 as Israel’s ambassador to Washington and served in that position until 2013. His piece in the Wall Street Journal, entitled “How Obama Abandoned Israel,” is part of a promotional campaign for his just-published memoir about his years as ambassador. In the article, Oren asserted that Obama abandoned the two main principles in Israel-U.S. relations – avoiding public disagreements (“no daylight”) and “no surprises” in terms of major policy changes.
On Tuesday, a few hours after Oren’s article was published, U.S. Ambassador Shapiro phoned Netanyahu. An Israeli source familiar with their conversation says that Shapiro asked Netanyahu to issue a public statement disavowing Oren’s accusations that Obama deliberately abandoned Israel from the time he entered the White House in 2008.
The source, who wished to remain anonymous since he was not authorized to reveal details to the press, said that Netanyahu turned down Shapiro’s request and said he had no intention of commenting publicly on what Oren wrote.
Shapiro also made a similar request to Finance Minister Moshe Kahlon, chairman of the Kulanu party of which Oren is a member. Unlike Netanyahu, Kahlon complied with the request. He summoned Oren for a discussion for clarification and subsequently sent a letter to the U.S. Ambassador saying that Oren’s comments against Obama do not represent the stance of Kulanu or its leader.
On Tuesday, Haaretz contacted the Prime Minister’s Office with a series of questions on the subject, including, what Netanyahu’s position was on Oren’s serious accusations against Obama.
The Prime Minister’s Office replied that it had no comment. Ambassador Shapiro declined to comment on the content of his conversation with Netanyahu.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry vehemently rejected Oren’s assertions in the Wall Street Journal article. State Department Spokesman John Kirby said in his daily briefing to reporters on Wednesday that Kerry read Oren’s article and believes that his claims against Obama “is absolutely inaccurate and false, and doesn't reflect what actually happened in the past.”
Kirby also said that Kerry thinks that Oren wrote what he did as “a politician trying to promote his book,” adding that, as ambassador, Oren "had limited visibility into many of the private discussions and deliberations that he describes."
Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan, who is also strategic affairs, and public diplomacy minister, also voiced harsh criticism over Oren's claims.
"Oren's claims are disconnected from reality," Erdan said on Thursday. "Oren is wrong to accuse President Obama of malicious intentions toward Israel. The president prevents harsh resolutions against Israeli from being passed at the UN, and actively tries to strengthen the security ties between the states. Saying that the president has abandoned Israel is a disconnected remark."


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Op-Ed 

Why Obama is wrong about Iran being 'rational' on nukes

By 
Obama says Iranian leaders' anti-Semitism doesn't preclude a desire for survival. History shows he's wrong
"The fact that you are anti-Semitic, or racist, doesn't preclude you from being interested in survival,” President Obama said last month in an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg in the Atlantic. “The fact that the supreme leader is anti-Semitic doesn't mean that this overrides all of his other considerations.”
The question of whether Iran, run by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and his ayatollahs, is a rational state goes to the very heart of the debate over its nuclear program and the negotiations, now nearing a June 30 deadline, to curb it.
Simply put: Those in the “rational” camp see a regime that wants to remain in power and achieve regional hegemony and will therefore cooperate, rather than languish under international sanctions that threaten to deny it both. The other side cannot accept that religious fanatics who deny the Holocaust, blame all evil on the Jews and pledge to annihilate the 6 million of them in Israel can be trusted with a nuclear program capable of producing the world's most destructive weapon in a single year.
The rational/irrational dispute was ever-present in the intimate discussions between the United States and Israel on the Iranian nuclear issue during my term as Israel's ambassador to Washington, from 2009 to the end of 2013. I took part in those talks and was impressed by their candor. Experts assessed the progress in Iran's program: the growing number of centrifuges in its expanding underground facilities, the rising stockpile of enriched uranium that could be used in not one but several bombs, and the time that would be required for Iran to “break out” or “sneak out” from international inspectors and become a nuclear power.
Both nations' technical estimates on Iran largely dovetailed. Where the two sides differed was over the nature of the Islamic Republic. The Americans tended to see Iranian leaders as logical actors who understood that the world would never allow them to attain nuclear weapons and would penalize them mercilessly — even militarily — for any attempt to try.
By contrast, most Israelis viewed the ayatollahs as radical jihadists who claimed they took instructions from the Shiite “Hidden Imam,” tortured homosexuals and executed women accused of adultery, and strove to commit genocide against Jews. Israelis could not rule out the possibility that the Iranians would be willing to sacrifice half of their people as martyrs in a war intended to “wipe Israel off the map.”
As famed Middle East scholar Bernard Lewis once observed, “Mutually assured destruction” for the Iranian regime “is not a deterrent — it's an inducement.”
The gap between the American and Israeli assessment of Iranian sanity only widened over the years. Obama insisted that the ayatollahs analyzed the nuclear issue on a cost-benefit basis. “They have their worldview and they see their interests. They're not North Korea,” he told Goldberg in a December interview.
Yet Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu saw Tehran's rulers as medieval fanatics determined to exterminate the Jews and achieve world domination. “You don't want a messianic apocalyptic cult controlling atomic bombs,” he warned Goldberg in a separate Atlantic interview in March. A nuclear-armed Iran, Netanyahu has frequently declared, is far worse than North Korea.
Which of them is right? Here's the problem with Obama's point of view: If indeed they are rational, Iranian leaders have had every reason to conclude that the president desperately wants a nuclear deal, and that their long-term cooperation is not really necessary.
Although the White House has repeatedly claimed that “the window for diplomacy will not remain open forever,” in fact it has never come close to shutting. Even now, without a deal in place, it seems obvious that the sanctions will start to unravel.
Consequently, the ayatollahs sensibly have determined that, by dragging out the negotiations, they can wrest further concessions from the United States. They can keep more centrifuges, more facilities and a larger uranium stockpile.
Why, logically, would Iran believe Obama's claim that “all options were on the table”? On the contrary, Iran has remained the world's leading state sponsor of terrorism — brazenly threatening America's allies in the Middle East, and in 2011 even allegedly planning a major terrorist attack in Washington against the Saudi ambassador — without facing military or even diplomatic retribution from the United States.
The Iranians have taken note of how the White House helped overthrow Libya's Moammar Kadafi after he gave up his nuclear program but shied away from North Korea when it tested more weapons. Iran can see how Syrian dictator Bashar Assad, by ceding part of his chemical arsenal, went from being America's problem to America's solution, and then to barrel-bombing his countrymen with impunity. Iranian rulers understood they could count on obtaining their nuclear program's objectives of regime survival and regional supremacy without dismantling a centrifuge.
Obama's argument not only fails logic's test but also history's. Anti-Semitism, the president further explained to Goldberg in May, “doesn't preclude you from being rational about the need to keep your economy afloat [or] being strategic about how you stay in power.” Except, in one infamous example, it did. The Nazis pursued insane ends. Even during the last days of World War II, as the Allied armies liberated Europe, they diverted precious military resources to massacring Jews.
Obama would never say that anti-black racists are rational. And he would certainly not trust them with the means — however monitored — to reach their racist goals. That was the message Israeli officials and I conveyed in our discreet talks with the administration. The response was not, to our mind, reasonable.
Michael Oren, a member of the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, is the author of "Ally: My Journal Across the American-Israeli Divide," to be published June 23.

____________________________________________________

ARGUMENT

How Obama Opened His Heart to the ‘Muslim World’

And got it stomped on. Israel’s former ambassador to the United States on the president’s naiveté as peacemaker, blinders to terrorism, and alienation of allies.
How Obama Opened His Heart to the ‘Muslim World’
Days after jihadi gunmen slaughtered 11 staffers of the Charlie Hebdomagazine and a policeman on January 7, hundreds of thousands of French people marched in solidarity against Islamic radicalism. Forty-four world leaders joined them, but not President Barack Obama. Neither did his attorney general at the time, Eric Holder, or Homeland Security Deputy Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, both of whom were in Paris that day. Other terrorists went on to murder four French Jews in a kosher market that they deliberately targeted. Yet Obama described the killers as “vicious zealots who … randomly shoot a bunch of folks in a deli.”
Pressed about the absence of a high-ranking American official at the Paris march, the White House responded by convening a long-delayed convention on “countering violent extremism.” And when reminded that one of the gunmen boasted that he intended to kill Jews, presidential Press Secretary Josh Earnest explained that the victims died “not because of who they were, but because of where they randomly happened to be.”
Obama’s boycotting of the memorial in Paris, like his refusal to acknowledge the identity of the perpetrators, the victims, or even the location of the market massacre, provides a broad window into his thinking on Islam and the Middle East. Simply put: The president could not participate in a protest against Muslim radicals whose motivations he sees as a distortion, rather than a radical interpretation, of Islam. And if there are no terrorists spurred by Islam, there can be no purposely selected Jewish shop or intended Jewish victims, only a deli and randomly present folks.
Understanding Obama’s worldview was crucial to my job as Israel’s ambassador to the United States. Right after entering office in June 2009, I devoted months to studying the new president, poring over his speeches, interviews, press releases, and memoirs, and meeting with many of his friends and supporters. The purpose of this self-taught course — Obama 101, I called it — was to get to the point where the president could no longer surprise me. And over the next four years I rarely was, especially on Muslim and Middle Eastern issues.
“To the Muslim world, we seek a new way forward based on mutual interest and mutual respect,” Obama declared in his first inaugural address. The underlying assumption was that America’s previous relations with Muslims were characterized by dissention and contempt. More significant, though, was the president’s use of the term “Muslim world,” a rough translation of the Arabic ummah. A concept developed by classical Islam, ummah refers to a community of believers that transcends borders, cultures, and nationalities. Obama not only believed that such a community existed but that he could address and accommodate it.
The novelty of this approach was surpassed only by Obama’s claim that he, personally, represented the bridge between this Muslim world and the West. Throughout the presidential campaign, he repeatedly referred to his Muslim family members, his earlier ties to Indonesia and the Muslim villages of Kenya, and his Arabic first and middle names. Surveys taken shortly after his election indicated that nearly a quarter of Americans thought their presidentwas a Muslim.
This did not deter him from actively pursuing his bridging role. Reconciling with the Muslim world was the theme of the president’s first television interview — with Dubai’s Al Arabiya — and his first speech abroad. “The United States is not, and will never be, at war with Islam,” he told the Turkish Parliament in April 2009. “America’s relationship with the Muslim community … cannot, and will not, just be based upon opposition to terrorism.… We seek broader engagement based on mutual interest and mutual respect. We will convey our deep appreciation for the Islamic faith.” But the fullest exposition of Obama’s attitude toward Islam, and his personal role in assuaging its adherents, came three months later in Cairo.
Billed by the White House as “President Obama Speaks to the Muslim World,” the speech was delivered to a hall of carefully selected Egyptian students. But the message was not aimed at them or even at the people of Egypt, but rather at all Muslims. “America and Islam are not exclusive,” the president determined. “[They] share … common principles — principles of justice and progress, tolerance, and the dignity of all human beings.” 
With multiple quotes from the Quran — each enthusiastically applauded — the president praised Islam’s accomplishments and listed colonialism, the Cold War, and modernity among the reasons for friction between Muslims and the West.
With multiple quotes from the Quran — each enthusiastically applauded — the president praised Islam’s accomplishments and listed colonialism, the Cold War, and modernity among the reasons for friction between Muslims and the West. “Violent extremists have exploited these tensions in a small but potent minority of Muslims,” he explained, in the only reference to the religious motivation of most terrorists. And he again cited his personal ties with Islam which, he said, “I have known Islam on three continents before coming to the region where it was first revealed.”
These pronouncements presaged what was, in fact, a profound recasting of U.S. policy. While reiterating America’s support for Israel’s security, Obama stridently criticized its settlement policy in the West Bank and endorsed the Palestinian claim to statehood. He also recognized Iran’s right to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes, upheld the principle of nonproliferation, and rejected former President George W. Bush’s policy of promoting American-style democracy in the Middle East. “No single nation should pick and choose which nations hold nuclear weapons,” he said. “No system of government can or should be imposed upon one nation by any other.” In essence, Obama offered a new deal in which the United States would respect popularly chosen Muslim leaders who were authentically rooted in their traditions and willing to engage with the West.
The Cairo speech was revolutionary. In the past, Western leaders had addressed the followers of Islam — Napoleon in invading Egypt in 1798 and Kaiser Wilhelm II while visiting Damascus a century later — but never before had an American president. Indeed, no president had ever spoken to adherents of a world faith, whether Catholics or Buddhists, and in a city they traditionally venerated. More significantly, the Cairo speech, twice as long as his inaugural address, served as the foundational document of Obama’s policy toward Muslims.
Whenever Israeli leaders were perplexed by the administration’s decision to restore diplomatic ties with Syria — severed by Bush after the assassination of Lebanese president Rafik Hariri — or its early outreach to Libya and Iran, I would always refer them to that text. When policymakers back home failed to understand why Obama stood by Turkish strongman Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who imprisoned journalists and backed Islamic radicals, or Mohamed Morsi, a leading member of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and briefly its president, I would invariably say: “Go back to the speech.” Erdogan and Morsi were both devout Muslims, democratically elected, and accepting of Obama’s outstretched hand. So, too, was Hassan Rouhani, who became Obama’s partner in seeking a negotiated settlement of the Iranian nuclear dispute.
How did the president arrive at his unique approach to Islam? The question became central to my research for Obama 101. One answer lies in the universities in which he studied and taught — Columbia, Harvard, and the University of Chicago — and where such ideas were long popular. Many of them could be traced to Orientalism, Edward Said’s scathing critique of Middle East studies, and subsequent articles in which he insisted that all scholars of the region be “genuinely engaged and sympathetic … to the Islamic world.” Published in 1978, Orientalism became the single most influential book in American humanities. As a visiting lecturer in the United States starting in the 1980s, I saw how Said’s work influenced not only Middle East studies but became a mainstay of syllabi for courses ranging from French colonial literature to Italian-African history. The notion that Islam was a uniform, universal entity with which the West must peacefully engage became widespread on American campuses and eventually penetrated the policymaking community. One of the primary texts in my Obama 101 course was the 2008 monograph, “Strategic Leadership: Framework for a 21st Century National Security Strategy,” written by foreign-relations experts, many of whom would soon hold senior positions in the new administration. While striving to place its relations with the Middle East on a new basis, the authors advised, America must seek “improved relations with more moderate elements of political Islam” and adapt “a narrative of pride in the achievements of Islam.”
In addition to its academic and international affairs origins, Obama’s attitudes toward Islam clearly stem from his personal interactions with Muslims. These were described in depth in his candid memoir, Dreams from My Father, published 13 years before his election as president. Obama wrote passionately of the Kenyan villages where, after many years of dislocation, he felt most at home and of his childhood experiences in Indonesia. I could imagine how a child raised by a Christian mother might see himself as a natural bridge between her two Muslim husbands. I could also speculate how that child’s abandonment by those men could lead him, many years later, to seek acceptance by their co-religionists.
Yet, tragically perhaps, Obama — and his outreach to the Muslim world — would not be accepted. With the outbreak of the Arab Spring, the vision of a United States at peace with the Muslim Middle East was supplanted by a patchwork of policies — military intervention in Libya, aerial bombing in Iraq, indifference to Syria, and entanglement with Egypt. Drone strikes, many of them personally approved by the president, killed hundreds of terrorists, but also untold numbers of civilians. Indeed, the killing of a Muslim — Osama bin Laden — rather than reconciling with one, remains one of Obama’s most memorable achievements.
Diplomatically, too, Obama’s outreach to Muslims was largely rebuffed. During his term in office, support for America among the peoples of the Middle East — and especially among Turks and Palestinians — reached anall-time nadir. Back in 2007, President Bush succeeded in convening Israeli and Arab leaders, together with the representatives of some 40 states, at the Annapolis peace conference. In May 2015, Obama had difficulty convincing several Arab leaders to attend a Camp David summit on the Iranian issue. The president who pledged to bring Arabs and Israelis together ultimately did so not through peace, but out of their common anxiety over his support for the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and his determination to reach a nuclear accord with Iran.
Only Iran, in fact, still holds out the promise of sustaining Obama’s initial hopes for a fresh start with Muslims. “[I]f we were able to get Iran to operate in a responsible fashion,” he told the New Yorker, “you could see an equilibrium developing between [it and] Sunni … Gulf states.” The assumption that a nuclear deal with Iran will render it “a very successful regional power” capable of healing, rather than inflaming, historic schisms remained central to Obama’s thinking. That assumption was scarcely shared by Sunni Muslims, many of whom watched with deep concern at what they perceived as an emerging U.S.-Iranian alliance.
Six years after offering to “extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist,” President Obama has seen that hand repeatedly shunned by Muslims. His speeches no longer recall his Muslim family members, and only his detractors now mention his middle name. And yet, to a remarkable extent, his policies remain unchanged. He still argues forcibly for the right of Muslim women to wear — rather than refuse to wear — the veil and insists on calling “violent extremists” those who kill in Islam’s name. “All of us have a responsibility to refute the notion that groups like ISIL somehow represent Islam,” he declared in February, using an acronym for the Islamic State. The term “Muslim world” is still part of his vocabulary.
Historians will likely look back at Obama’s policy toward Islam with a combination of curiosity and incredulousness. While some may credit the president for his good intentions, others might fault him for being naïve and detached from a complex and increasingly lethal reality. For the Middle East continues to fracture and pose multiple threats to America and its allies. Even if he succeeds in concluding a nuclear deal with Iran, the expansion of the Islamic State and other jihadi movements will underscore the failure of Obama’s outreach to Muslims. The need to engage them — militarily, culturally, philanthropically, and even theologically — will meanwhile mount. The president’s successor, whether Democrat or Republican, will have to grapple with that reality from the moment she or he enters the White House. The first decision should be to recognize that those who kill in Islam’s name are not mere violent extremists but fanatics driven by a specific religion’s zeal. And their victims are anything but random.
MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images