Let’s review the bidding: Syria is engaging in wholesale slaughter, a terrorist group is carving a caliphate out of Syria and Iraq, Libya is descending into anarchy and car bombs are exploding in Beirut.
But when Israel finds the bodies of three abducted teenagers, President Obama urges “all the parties to refrain from steps that could further destabilize the situation.”
Whose side are we on?
Not surprisingly, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ignored Obama and ordered attacks against the terror groups behind the savage murders.
The only surprise is that Obama never learns. He came into office determined to hold Israel to a different standard, and he’s still demanding that it make peace while the Palestinians make war.
The region is on fire, exploding with unchecked violence and mayhem, yet the Jewish state is supposed to “refrain.”
Then what? Pray for protection? Count on America? Trust the tender mercies of Hamas?
The region’s lone democracy is never more alone than when America tries to be evenhanded. A moral equivalency that denies Jews the right to self-defense while excusing Arab attacks is neither moral nor equal.
It is a cowardly, ignorant approach that can yield only more death and destruction. It will never lead to peace.
It is probably no coincidence that the three teens were kidnapped soon after the so-called peace talks collapsed. It was a process only Washington wanted, and when it predictably ended in acrimony, the two Palestinian factions announced they would join forces.
That meant Hamas, the terror group that pledges Israel’s destruction, would be part of the government with the Palestinian Authority. And America said this was hunky-dory.
Never mind that it is against US law to give aid to a Palestinian government that contains Hamas, unless it renounces violence and accepts Israel’s right to exist. None of those conditions was met, yet Secretary of State John Kerry and Obama acted as if they were.
Even after Hamas leaders applauded the kidnapping, without confirming or denying a role, Obama urged both sides to play nice.
This is worse than useless. The failure to recognize that Arab hatred of Jews is being fostered daily in mosques, music, the media and schools amounts to willful ignorance. It’s there and documented for those who want to see it.
There was a time, not long ago, when Kerry and Obama bought hook, line and sinker the Arab myth that solving the Israeli-Palestinian issue was key to regional stability. All the lambs and all the lions would then lie down together, blah, blah, blah.
Ever since the Arab Nightmare, er, Spring, you don’t hear anyone talk like that. But myths die hard, and White House insistence that Israel keep making concessions until Palestinians say yes indicates that American policy hasn’t really changed.
Stability has nothing to do with whether Israel builds a settlement or takes revenge for a triple murder. Unprovoked Muslim violence — against other Muslims, against Jews and against Christians — is tearing the Mideast apart and spreading fear around the world.
Israel, of course, knows all this, but imagine the burden of feeling abandoned by America. It has no other friend. No one else — certainly not Europe and certainly not the United Nations — is even remotely dependable. It is America, or it is nothing.
Today, again, it is nothing.
Hizzy or isn’t he for ‘Real’?
Shhhhhh, hear that sound? It’s the sound of rubber meeting the road.
Six months after Bill de Blasio moved into City Hall, the jabbering about progressive values is giving way to the sobering reality of governing. The mayor’s vision is being tested by facts.
The most significant test is the rise in shootings. Dramatic declines in the use of stop, question and frisk by the NYPD — down about 90 percent over last year — almost certainly play a role, yet admitting any link would undermine candidate de Blasio’s attacks on the police.
So far, the mayor is letting top cop Bill Bratton do the talking, but that can’t last. The ultimate responsibility is the mayor’s, and we will know soon whether he cares more about public safety than ideological purity.
A more personal test involves the first family’s move to Gracie Mansion. Sources tell The Post the mayor’s plan is to rent out his Park Slope home, and one broker estimates he could get $6,500 a month for the three-bedroom, one-bath house. That’s $78,000 a year, and would be on top of the $52,000 in rental income he reported for another house he owns.
The combined value of the houses is over $3 million, a princely sum for a warrior against income inequality. And remember, de Blasio the mayor sought a rent freeze on private apartments, even as de Blasio the landlord saw his rental income grow 9 percent last year.
Readers smell a hypocrite and one, Morley Goldberg, has a puckish suggestion: The mayor should let a homeless family live in his Park Slope house while he lives rent-free in Gracie Mansion.
“Let see if he really believes what he preaches,” Goldberg writes. “Is he willing to help the homeless when it comes out of his pocket?”
The answer will be no, but the point is taken. Governing isn’t for amateurs or pretenders.
Change the ‘O’ to ‘I’
The Post cartoon yesterday, by Bob Gorrell, showed a caricature of President Obama summarizing the three branches of government: “Me, myself and I.”
It’s clever and contains more than a kernel of truth.
Take the White House reaction to the Supreme Court decision that allowed closely held private companies to opt out of the ObamaCare requirement for contraception coverage on religious grounds. Press secretary Josh Earnest criticized it, saying, “The constitutional lawyer in the Oval Office disagrees” with the ruling.
See, we don’t need no stinkin’ Supreme Court. We have Obama to tell us what the Founders intended.
Later, the president blasted Congress for not passing an immigration law, declaring that “I’m beginning a new effort to fix as much of our immigration system as I can on my own, without Congress.”
See, we don’t need no stinkin’ Congress. Obama knows what laws we need.
We should count ourselves lucky. Just in time for July 4th, we get a reminder that our freedom is never free, nor is it guaranteed.
Dirt everywhere
More bipartisanship in Albany: Both a Democrat and a Republican were indicted this week.
The big fish is state Sen. Thomas Libous, the deputy GOP majority leader. The feds charge he lied to the FBI when he denied getting his son a job at a law firm by promising to steer state business to the firm.
The case comes days after Gabriela Rosa, an Assembly Democrat from Manhattan, pleaded guilty to using a sham marriage to become a US citizen.
According to one group, 26 legislators left office in corruption cases since 2000. Make that 26 and counting.