Piers Akerman: Obama barracks for the apostles of hate

THE best thing about January 2017 will be the presence of a new American President, writes Piers Akerman.

Piers Akerman.

THE best thing about January 2017 will be the presence of a new American President.

Seven years ago, the Norwegian Nobel committee awarded the then newly-elected President Barack Obama its Peace Prize.

If it had any integrity, it should strip him of this award in the next three weeks before he leaves office in shame and disgrace.

Not that the Nobel committee has a great record in handing out peace prizes.

In 1994, it gave PLO terrorist leader Yasser Arafat the same award, but he shared it with Israel’s Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin.

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Unsurprisingly, Arafat walked away from the peace deal and resumed murdering civilians.

He was an evil man and the barbaric organisation he founded lives on and keeps killing innocents.

Obama may not be evil but he has all but killed hopes of any peace anytime soon in the Middle East, and in particular, he has ensured that Palestinian terrorists will feel they have been given a charter to kill by the UN with the blessing of America.

Little wonder that the Israelis, who strive to maintain the only liberal democracy in the region in the face of genocidal enemies, feel that Obama is the weakest US President they have dealt with since achieving nationhood in 1948.

Restricted to two terms in office, the dead duck US President overturned nearly a century of American support for the state of Israel last week when he engineered a UN ­Security resolution which harshly condemned Israel.

He then instructed State ­department officials to abstain from the vote. Shamefully, New Zealand’s new Prime Minister Bill English was among those conned into co-sponsoring the resolution, joining such leading lights of international diplomacy and statesmanship as Senegal, Venezuela and Malaysia.

Barack Obama. Picture: AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais

Even for the former community organiser and insignificant senator, it was an amazing act of legacy cowardice from the soon to be ex-president but it fits neatly into his litany of foreign policy failures, along with the US withdrawal from Iraq, its encouragement of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, the lack of support for the Arab Spring — look what the Arab winter has wrought for millions of Syrians — and the loaded nuclear deal with the insane mullahs who run Iran and now export terror globally.

In an attempt to justify Obama’s undergraduate understanding and adolescent policy strategy, Secretary of State John Kerry sallied into the sordid realms of moral equivalency to claim the terrorist Hamas regimen in Gaza was merely “radical” as ­opposed to the “extreme” ­elected Israeli government.

The Hamas charter calls for the death of Jews wherever they may be found and is totally opposed to an Israeli state.

That would be the Jewish state which currently has 17 elected Arab members seated in its Knesset.

I visited the Israeli parliament in the week before Christmas as a delegate to the Australian, Israeli, UK Dialogue. I saw and met Muslim members and Christian members and Jewish members. They were working to build and keep safe Israel, the only Middle Eastern nation in which Christians can live easily, as can Jews and as can Muslims.

Donald Trump. Picture: AP Photo/Matt Rourke

Australia has a very special relationship with Israel which should never be ignored, and Foreign Minister Julie Bishop’s statement that we would not have supported the condemnation of the nation had we ­occupied a seat on the Security Council is to be welcomed.

Our national bond with ­Israel goes back to the liberation of parts of the Beirut Vilayet, which comprised parts of Syria, Lebanon and Galilee. There was no Palestine under the Ottomans.

The Australian Light Horse defeated the Turks and the ­region they liberated became known as Palestine under the British. The fantasies of the area having been an Arab homeland are just that, fantasies, as every history student knows. Islam is a relatively ­recent arrival in the neighbourhood. Mohammed only paid a visit in a dream during which he said later he had flown aboard a winged horse with a woman’s head and ­ascended to Heaven from the farthermost mosque.

Moses was in sight of the Promised Land after escaping the Pharaoh’s slave quarters nearly 1300 years before Christ was born in Bethlehem (now an Arab stronghold) and ­Mohammed wasn’t born until nearly 2000 years after Moses, and almost 600 years after the events described in the New Testament.

Not only were the Light Horsemen present when the Ottoman Empire was rolled back in World War I, Australian H.V. (Doc) Evatt was president of the UN General Assembly and critical to that body’s recognition of the new state in 1949.

Israel’s record in almost every field of human endeavour is one of extraordinary achievement. As a democracy, it is a model of inclusiveness. As a centre of technological excellence it is exemplary.

Individuals like Obama or Kerry, with their lacklustre credentials and their record of failure, simply don’t have the stature to make pronouncements on Israel or its Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

President-elect Donald Trump has warned Obama and the UN that things will be different after his inauguration.

He sees the contribution that an enlightened Israel ­offers the world while Obama seeks to mollify the Muslim majority in the UN and the ­Islamist terrorists who are nurtured in the mire of their medieval mindset.

The so-called Palestinian question has never been about land, it’s always been about ­hatred. It’s spelled out in its ­appalling barbarity in the Hamas Charter: hatred of the West, hatred of non-Muslims and hatred of Christians and Jews in particular.

Peace in the region will only be found when the Western notion of trust and, the Christian understanding of love is understood by Israel’s neighbours.

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