Benjamin Netanyahu Blasts Iran at United Nations Assembly

What part of "wipe Israel off the map" doesn't MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell understand? It was right after Benjamin Netanyahu's eloquent speech before the United Nations today that Andrea Mitchell asked guest and former British Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair how the U.S. could get Israel to "stand down" from its opposition to Iran's development of nuclear weapons. I wonder where Mitchell got the idea that it was America's job to participate in Iranian hegemony in that region of the world.

The idea of a unilateral "stand down" may have come directly from the White House with President Obama announcing his intentions to talk with Mahmoud Ahmadinajad without any preconditions or concessions prior to his election. But isn't Andrea Mitchell supposed to be a journalist? How then does Mitchell make the transition from reporting the news to cheerleading for the administration? For his part, Blair was quick to point out the difficulty of Israel's making nice with people who want to "wipe Israel off the map."

It seems positively incredible to me that people could sit there straight-faced and listen to Ahmadinajad defaming, profaning, and inflaming without hurling their gourmet lunches. Netanyahu held in his hand the plans of a Nazi concentration camp, signed by Heinrich Himmler, as he addressed the members. Benjamin Netanyahu blasted the U.N for failing to condemn the anti-Semites who spread lies about the Holocaust with temerity. The Iranian officials must have known what was coming for they had abandoned the hall as they have abandoned the truth about the murder of six million Jews. I can understand how difficult it must have been for Ahmadinajad to face the truth of the concentration camps, and how he must hide his face, as if the truth were a contaminant which would destroy his precarious self-delusions.

Perhaps another unpleasant reminder for Ahmadinajad is that photo of the Iranian protestor named Neda, who appeared dying on the front page of the Wall Street Journal, the trace of a defiant smile upon her lips, the eyes looking up hauntingly in death, perhaps last seeing the Iranian Secret Police goons who fired the bullet into her courageous young heart. In his speech before the U.N, Netanyahu remembered Neda, and the other Iranian protestors who marched in the streets and were crushed again just a week ago.

President Obama wants more than anything to be off the hook for Afghanistan, yet the Iranians have trained Taliban operatives to fight against NATO forces in Afghanistan. The Iranians have repeatedly shipped boatloads of arms to terrorists in Gaza and to Hizbollah in Lebanon to be used in shelling civilian towns in Israel. When is America going to stop apologizing for the coinciding American and Israeli interests in the Middle East? Why do we kowtow to terrorist states in the futile hope of currying favor with them? Why do we apologize for support of another democracy? Israel is a democracy, just as we used to be. Does anyone worry about Israel planting bombs on New York subways?

And why now, at the United Nations, must the United States play nursemaid to the malformed egos of deranged dictators? Is this in the interest of peace? Are not clarity and truthfulness the fundamental moral values of democracy and freedom? Unfortunately, we're finding neither clarity nor honesty in this administration's foreign policy. Afghanistan was said by Obama to be the right war, Iraq the wrong one. Let alone the fact that, in Iraq, Obama was handed a gift purchased with the blood of patriots for whom he was not accountable. Was the Obama concern with Afghanistan only a campaign slogan to be discarded when the new government took office?

Meanwhile, Vice-President Biden, whom we are instructed to believe is an expert in foreign affairs, succumbs to entreaties from the pacifist left of his party and announces today we are to focus on Al Qaeda, a code phrase for withdrawal and capitulation. When Biden was a candidate, he publicly worried that Obama could not effectively answer that 3:00 a.m. phone call. In light of his new focus on pulling back ground troops and relying on Flash Gordon warfare tactics, perhaps we should ask why he refused the 3:00 a.m. phone call from General McChrystal.

General McChrystal, appointed by President Obama to follow a defined strategy for countering an insurgency, says he needs 40,000 troops to accomplish his mission while Carl Levin, the Ben Franklin lookalike who possesses none of the Founder's talents, argues for retreat from his high perch on the Senate Armed Forces Committee. The lowliest private in Afghanistan could give better advice and counsel on the Afghanistan ground situation than Levin. Our troops have excellent military leadership but they deserve better than they are getting from the people currently dominating the Congress. While guys like Levin cynically offer that Obama is "saving jobs" as employment chases 10 percent, it never occurs to them that precious lives can be saved with adequate troop levels in Afghanistan. But then again, as politicians, they seem more concerned with posing as leaders than with leading.

The deteriorating foreign policy situation with regard to Afghanistan prompted Former Secretary of Defense Condaleeza Rice to break her silence yesterday when, out of a desperate worry for the path we are lost on, said that the abandonment of the war in Afghanistan right now would just about guarantee further attacks on U.S. soil. Worst of all, at a time when American morality is in question, we must look to Benjamin Netanyahu, the leader of another country, to provide the essential moral courage Americans should be seeing in our own leaders.