US President Barack Omama speaks with AFL-CIO Chairman Richard Trunka before a meeting with the Presidents Council on Jobs and Competitiveness at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building in Washington, DC, February 24, 2011
Caroline Glick: "The brilliant academic president who theorized that diplomacy-by-apology was more powerful than governing-by-strength is being outmaneuvered -- and outright humiliated -- by the Arab world: Hamas, the Muslim brotherhood and Fatah."
Wednesday night, Israelis received our first taste of the new Middle East with the missile strike on Beersheba and Netivot. Iran's Palestinian proxy, the local branch of the Muslim Brotherhood known as Hamas carried out its latest war crime right after Iran's battleships entered Syria's Latakia port.
Their voyage through the Suez Canal to Syria was an unadulterated triumph for the mullahs. For the first time since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Iran's warships sailed across the canal without even being inspected by the Egyptian, US or Israeli navies. On the diplomatic front, the Iranian-dominated new Middle East has had a pronounced impact on the Western-backed Fatah-led Palestinian Authority's political posture towards the US.
The PA picked a fight with America just after the Obama administration forced Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to surrender power. Mubarak's departure was a strategic victory for the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and for its sister branch Hamas in Gaza.
As part of his efforts to neutralize the threat the Muslim Brotherhood posed to his regime, Mubarak sealed off Gaza's border with Egypt after Hamas seized power there in June 2007. The Gaza-Sinai border was breached during last month's revolution. Since Mubarak's forced resignation, the military junta now leading Egypt has failed to reseal it. The revolution in Egypt happened just after the PA was thrown into a state of disarray. Al Jazeerah's exposure of PA documents indicating the leadership's willingness to make minor compromises with Israel in the framework of a peace deal served to discredit Fatah leaders in the eyes of the Israel-hating Palestinian public. In the wake of the al Jazeerah revelations, senior PA leaders escalated their anti-Israel and anti-American pronouncements. The PA's chief negotiator Saeb Erekat was forced to resign.
The shift in the regional power balance following Mubarak's fall has caused Fatah leaders to view their ties to the US as a strategic liability. If they wish to survive, they must cut a deal with Hamas. And to convince Hamas to cut a deal, they need to abandon the US.
And so they have.
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