Bibi Over Barack
By Quin Hillyer on 3.24.10 @ 11:25AM
The American Spectator Blog
After yesterday’s meetings between Binyamin Netanyahu and Barack Obama, for the first time in my life I quite literally feel more allegiance to the head of a foreign state than I do to the president of the United States. Mind you, this is personal: NOT allegiance to the foreign state, nor allegiance to its office of PM over this American government or the office of the president, but a greater personal allegiance — greater trust in, greater belief that his goals and stances are actually better for the United States itself — to the person of Netanyahu than to that of The One.
Just so the left and MSM can’t go screaming like madmen, let me be even more clear: Let me change the word “allegiance” to “trusting respect,” and let me say also that this means I believe Netanyahu’s words, trust his judgment, and feel more secure in his motives, more than I believe, trust, and feel more secure with Obama. (This has nothing whatsoever with my loyalty to the United States of America, of course, which is undying. All too often, too many people conflate the man with the office of the presidency, but they are not one and the same. Obama is my president. But he is not a good one, and I do not have to respect him for me to respect the office.)
I write this not as a Jew, but as a cradle Episcopalian, or a sort of hybrid Anglo-Catholic. In short, not based on faith, but on reason. If the Jewish state can’t allow free people to build housing in Jerusalem, then the Irish state may as well not let Irish build in Dublin. And if the American administration tries to tell the Jewish state that it is wrong to merely advance by one mid-range step along a multi-step process towards permitting those buildings, then the Jewish PM has every right to tell the American administration the same thing Dick Cheney told the execrable Patrick Leahy.
As Carl in Jerusalem put it —
Indeed.
Quin Hillyer is a senior editorial writer at the Washington Times and senior editor of The American Spectator.
Hat Tip to Carl in Jerusalem at Israel Matzav
Tags: Bibi Netanyahu, Israel
