OPINION:
ANALYSIS/OPINION:
President Obama says Rudy Giuliani was wrong. He does, too, love America. That’s good enough for me. He says he’s a Christian, despite his constant love bombs for Islam, and if that’s good enough for God it’s good enough for me, too. Conversations between believers and the Almighty are confidential, and have yet to be cracked by the National Security Agency (but we can be sure they’re working on it).
The president loves our allies, too. He sent the bust of Winston Churchill back to London, whence it came, only because it was cluttering up the Oval Office and getting rid of it had nothing to do with memories of snubs and affronts his Kenyan father passed down to him (though Churchill was an unrepentant colonialist). The president dearly loves Old Blighty.
He loves la belle France, too, and if it hadn’t interfered with a golf date — a good tee time on a good course on a sunny day must not be wasted — he would have hurried to France to march in step with other heads of the states of the West to pay honor to the slain of the radical Islamic shootouts in Paris.
The president even loves Israel, but in his way. It’s tough love to bring the Jews to heel. Just as Secretary of State John Kerry is topping up a deal to satisfy the mullahs in Iran, comes the news that the United States has declassified a 386-page report that reveals in minute detail Israel’s super-discreet nuclear program. Everybody knows Israel has one, but until now Israel, with American support, has never acknowledged it. To do so, all mature hands have agreed, could set off a nuclear arms race in the Middle East.
The American declassification, first reported by the Israeli news site Arutz Sheva, was made public in the wake of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to Congress, when he warned that the deal envisioned by Mr. Obama would leave Iran with “nuclear breakout capabilities.”
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So why did Mr. Obama do it? Perhaps the question to ask is (as in the rock classic of days gone by), “What’s love got to do with it?” The declassified report tells how Israel developed “the kind of codes which detail fission and fusion processes on a microscopic and macroscopic level,” describing how in the 1980s Israel was on the brink of creating bombs a thousand times more powerful than the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki and ended World War II.
The information in the report, declassified in February, is not new. It was written in 1987 by the Institute for Defense Analysis, which is funded by the U.S. government for the Pentagon. But it contains information that might be useful as tips, not only for Iran but for other rogue governments with an itch to blow up the world in the service of Allah.
Curiously, when the Pentagon ordered the declassification, it retained the classification of information about nuclear research in Italy, France, Britain and other NATO countries. Mr. Obama apparently loves the Israelis so much he puts them in a special category, to be treated differently from everyone else.
Mr. Obama, for reasons known only to him, reserves his most potent love bombs for Islam, perhaps in gratitude for the early education he received in Islamic schools in Indonesia. He was so blinded by gratitude that he can’t see the Islamic radicals everyone else sees clearly. No one at the White House dare call radical Islamic terrorists either “Islamic” or “radical.”
But his throwing a stink bomb at Israel just now is puzzling. “The failure to maintain the degree of mature and co-operative discretion that officials from several governments have exercised until now marks a serious change in the code of conduct,” a government source tells the Weekly Standard. “It is not wise to draw attention to [the Israeli nuclear program] because it would tend to destabilize the international order and encourage others to pursue nuclear capabilities.”
Mr. Obama has a vision of a warm, lovable Iran that no one else shares. “They have a path to break through isolation and they should seize it,” he told NPR Radio in December. “Because if they do, there’s incredible talent and resources and sophistication inside of Iran, and it would be a very successful regional power.”
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Powerful enough, perhaps, to redeem the mullahs’ oft-stated goal, to wipe Israel off the map. The mad scientists are hard at work in Tehran, but there’s no love in the Islamic bomb.
• Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.
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