The President’s Speech

We were enormously impressed with the President’s speech at Whitehall. He defended America, democracy, freedom, alliances, NATO and the liberation of Iraq’s 26 million people. He made allied resolve in the war a counterpoint to UN weakness. He reminded the Europeans that their own freedom came at the point of a gun – ours. We were moved by his pointed comments about anti-Semitism and relieved that the audience applauded. We liked the gentle jokes at his own expense and that of France.

We were enormously impressed with the President’s speech at Whitehall. He defended America, democracy, freedom, alliances, NATO and the liberation of Iraq’s 26 million people. He made allied resolve in the war a counterpoint to UN weakness. He reminded the Europeans that their own freedom came at the point of a gun – ours. We were moved by his pointed comments about anti-Semitism and relieved that the audience applauded. We liked the gentle jokes at his own expense and that of France.

He was everything the nasty, rude, crude, shrilly hysterical – and wrong – European (including British) press and the Mayor of London were not.

But the speech, for all its righteous eloquence, had one GLARING flaw.

Mr. Bush used that forum to criticize certain Israeli government policies without noted appreciation of two points. Israel is a democracy equal to the U.S., Britain, Sweden or Italy. The decisions of its government are made with the consent of the governed and with recourse for the people to change that government. And Israel is under siege by the same insidious forces against which the entire rest of the speech was directed.

Killing Jews in Israel is no different from killing Jews in Istanbul; and in the end, no different from killing Americans in New York or in Baghdad. Hamas, the Islamic Jihad and Arafat’s Tanzim are an inseparable part of the forces of evil and repression the President so splendidly denounced and against which he has assembled an impressive coalition. They are financed by the same tangled web of blood money the President is working so hard to unravel. They slither in the same filthy ideological swamp the President so wishes to drain.

Oh, you say, the President just had to balance his tough criticism of Arafat. And you say, the President didn’t denounce Israel’s military activities and he chose at least one point where the Israeli government agrees with him (outposts). It was still wrong.

It was narrowly wrong because for many in Europe, including in Britain, the fine points will be overwhelmed by the fact that Israel was criticized at all – just like Arafat, just like Saddam, just like jihadists, just like the rest of those fascists.

More broadly, parallel criticism of the Palestinian dictator/murderer and Israel’s democracy undermines the basis of everything the U.S. is doing to expand liberty by setting a single standard for international behavior. Driving a wedge between our fight and Israel’s allows for the opinion that Israeli behavior – not Palestinian ideology – is why Israelis are murdered. The corollary would be that American behavior – not jihadist ideology – is why Americans are murdered and if Americans would just stop doing what makes the bad guys mad, they’d stop being terrorists.

Both of these opinions are, in fact, held in Europe. Both are wrong. The President inveighed against only one.