JPOST: Only 6% of Israelis see US gov’t as pro-Israel – UPDATED!

JPOST:

Only 6 percent of Jewish Israelis consider the views of American President Barack Obama’s administration pro-Israel, according to a new Jerusalem Post-sponsored Smith Research poll.

Another 50% of those sampled consider the policies of Obama’s administration more pro-Palestinian than pro-Israeli, and 36% said the policies were neutral. The remaining 8% did not express an opinion.

Israelis’ views of Obama’s predecessor in the White House, George W. Bush, are nearly the opposite. According to last month’s poll, 88% of Israelis considered his administration pro-Israel, 7% said Bush was neutral and just 2% labeled him pro-Palestinian.

Who can blame them? Obama had surrounded himself around anti-semites Rev. Wright, Louis Farrakhan, William Ayers, Rashid Khalidi, and others. The Obama campaign hired Robert Malley in the campaign whose extreme views against Israel are well known. The campaign rebuked Malley and said that he would never work for the campaign again only to hire him to work in the Obama Administration (LINK). Samantha Power who had advocated military intervention to create a Palestinian state was also removed from the campaign for her extreme views on Israel and was hired back to work in the administration.

To make matters worse, Obama tried to link internal Israeli policy with Iranian nukes by telling Israel that it had better obey Obama in matters of internal policy or the U.S. would take a weaker stance against Iranian nukes (LINK).

See the Philidelphia Bulletin, American Thinker and the New York Post on this very subject.

UPDATE – NY Post new column:

ISRAEL BETRAYED

PRESIDENT OBAMA IS TREATING OUR FRIEND LIKE A FIEND, AND TURNING PUBLIC OPINION AGAINST AN ALLY

When Barack Obama was running for president, he vigorously reassured voters of his firm commitment to America’s special relationship with Israel. Indeed, he worked to beef up his pro-Israel bona fides long before he even announced his intention to run. In a 2006 speech before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, Obama recounted a helicopter tour over the Israeli border with the West Bank. “I could truly see how close everything is and why peace through security is the only way for Israel,” he said. In that same speech, Obama called the Jewish State “our strongest ally in the region and its only established democracy.” During the primary and general election campaigns, Obama dispatched a stream of high-profile Jewish supporters to canvas Florida, and in a 2008 AIPAC speech, he went so far as to declare that Jerusalem must remain the “undivided” capital of Israel.

For all the qualms that anti-Obama “smears” would depress support in the Jewish community, Jews rewarded Obama with nearly 80% of their votes, more than they gave John Kerry.

Just six months into the new administration, however, it is becoming increasingly clear that those who harbored suspicions about Obama’s approach to the Middle East had good reason to be worried. A confluence of factors — including his administration’s undue pressure on Israel, a conciliatory approach to authoritarian Muslim regimes, and the baseless linkage of the failed “peace process” to the curtailment of the Iranian nuclear program — point to what could become “the greatest disagreement between the two countries in the history of their relationship,” as Middle East expert Robert Satloff recently told Newsweek.

This dramatic shift in American policy began several months ago when the administration signaled that it would make the cessation of Israeli settlement activity in the West Bank the centerpiece of its policy to revamp the region. And that approach, mostly hinted at through anonymous leaks, became as good as official when Obama delivered his vaunted address to the Muslim world in Cairo earlier this month. In that speech, Israel (and, specifically, its policy of settlement construction) was the only state to merit specific criticism from the president of the United States. Among all the degradations and injustices in the Middle East, from the abhorrent treatment of women in nations like Saudi Arabia, to Syrian-backed assassinations of pro-sovereignty politicians in Lebanon, to the arrest and imprisonment of gay men in Egypt, the leader of the free world singled out America’s one, reliable democratic ally in the region for rebuke.

Obama’s strategic worldview assumes that once the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is resolved, other problems in the Middle East will be easier to fix, if not solve themselves. “We understand that Israel’s preoccupation with Iran as an existential threat,” National Security Advisor Jim Jones told George Stephanopoulos last month. “We agree with that. And by the same token, there are a lot of things that you can do to diminish that existential threat by working hard towards achieving a two-state solution.”

By establishing this connection, the fate of the entire region thus hinges upon the resolution of a problem that hasn’t had a solution for over six decades. This is an awfully convenient view for those who enjoy the status quo, which is why so many Arab despots cling to it, and it’s discouraging to see the Obama administration joining them.

“Linkage” is faulty for two reasons. The first is intrinsic to the peace process itself, as it is going nowhere. And it will continue to go nowhere for at least as long as Hamas — a terrorist organization constitutionally committed to the destruction of Israel and the murder of Jews — rules the Gaza Strip, which it has controlled since violently seizing power in the summer of 2007. But it’s not just Hamas that remains hesitant to work with Israel. To see the continued intransigence of the Palestinians, witness their bizarre reactions to Benjamin Netanyahu’s momentous speech last week, in which the Israeli Prime Minister, for the first time in his career, announced his support for the two-state solution so obsessively demanded by the international community. The Palestinian Ambassador to Egypt denounced Netanyahu’s pledge as “nothing but a hoax.” The PLO Executive Committee Secretary called Netanyahu a “liar and a crook” who is “looking for ploys to disrupt the peace endeavor.” A spokesman for Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas said that, “The speech has destroyed all peace initiatives and [chances for] a solution.” And these are the so-called “moderates.”

The second reason why “linkage” is a faulty premise, and why the Obama administration is so foolish to pursue it, is that the problems of the Middle East are not inspired by the lack of a Palestinian state. The biggest crisis in the Middle East right now is Iran’s mad quest for nuclear weapons. Nothing even comes close. Even the Arab states — whose citizens, we are told, cannot rest due to Palestinian statelessness — are letting the world know that their foremost concern is a revolutionary Islamic theocracy with nuclear weapons (As the dramatic and inspiring street protests in Tehran over the past week have amply demonstrated, what really rouses the Muslim “street” is the venality and cruelty of the region’s authoritarian governments, not far-off Zionists reluctant to give Palestinians a state).

Follow the link to read more. This line above all stood out:

There are even signs of rising anti-Semitism, as a survey by Columbia and Stanford professors found that 32% of Democrats blamed Jews for the financial crisis.