New Yorker editor David Remnick is a shameless Obama hack. He also despises Israel.
The White House has a long history of routing its spin through people like that. But the spin itself can be revealing. Here's what Remnick is spinning about Obama's new war on the Jewish State.
For at least two years, President Obama, frustrated by Netanyahu and by failed attempts to make serious progress on the Palestinian question, has been considering the question of legacy. Pressed by Kerry, who has shown an almost quixotic desire to press the Israelis, Obama considered laying out a framework of any future peace.
Two things.
1. Pressed by.... desire to press. Really? Just because Remnick is a hack doesn't mean he has to write like one.
2. There's a backdoor admission, as usual, that Israel is right about Obama being behind the UN resolution. And that Obama Inc. is lying.
Obama expected that Hillary Clinton would win the election; he thought it would be better to coördinate what sort of diplomatic gesture to make before leaving the White House...
But then came the Trump victory. The President-elect’s appointment of David Friedman, a pro-settlement bankruptcy lawyer, as the next U.S. Ambassador to Israel “had a lot of weight in the President’s thinking” about what to do next, one senior Administration official told me. The official told me that the Administration had been “alarmed” by many of Trump’s appointments to his national-security team—notably the appointment of Michael Flynn as national-security adviser—but the selection of Friedman was “over the top.”
“The last thing you want to do as you leave office is to pick a fight with the organized Jewish community, but Friedman is so beyond the pale,” the adviser said.
So, for all intents and purposes, this is an admission that Obama went to war with Israel, to sabotage Trump's foreign policy. Never mind the rest of the spin and propaganda.
And yet is that the truth, or is Obama Inc. handing liberal Jews a sympathetic excuse for its actions. What better way to sell its war on the Jewish State than by claiming that Obama really hates Trump. Israel is just a pawn in the fight between Trump and Obama?
The appointment of Friedman as the next U.S. Ambassador makes it plain to Netanyahu that the Trump Administration, when it takes power by law and not just by Twitter, will ease the pressure on Israel. In a Trump Administration, Friedman wrote during the campaign in the Jerusalem Post, Israel will feel “no pressure” from the United States and “there will be no daylight between the two countries.”
But then if you believe Remnick, this is what Obama really wants to sabotage.