Israel Matzav: Boehner, McCain slam Obama

Boehner, McCain slam Obama

House Minority leader John Boehner (R-Oh.) has slammed the Obama administration for its treatment of Israel (Hat Tip: Memeorandum).

"The administration has demonstrated a repeated pattern since it took office: while it makes concessions to countries acting contrary to U.S. national interests," Boehner (R-Ohio) said in his statement. "It ignores or snubs the commitments, shared values and sacrifices of many of our country’s best allies."

Boehner argued that the President should be more concerned with the behavior of Iran rather than Israel.

That's fair.

In the afternoon, Senators John McCain (R-Az.) and Joe Lieberman (I-Ct.) took the Senate floor to act as a tag team ripping the Obama administration.

McCain kicked things off asking (from a rough transcript) if it really helps to “have public disparagement by the secretary of state, by the president’s political adviser on the Sunday shows,” and whether it wouldn’t be better to “lower the dialogue, talk quietly among friends, and work together towards the mutual goals that we share.” Lieberman responded:

[The U.S.-Israel relationship is] one of the strongest, most important, most steadfast bilateral alliances we have in the world because it is not based on the temporal, that is matters that come and go, or politics and diplomacy. It’s based on shared values, shared strategic interests in the world and unfortunately now on the fact that the United States and the Israelis are also targets of the Islamic extremists, the terrorists who threaten the security of so much of the world.

Lieberman then went on to explain that a “bureaucratic mistake” was allowed to become a “major, for the moment, source of division” between the U.S. and Israel. He continued that this is “an area of Jerusalem that is today mostly Jewish” and that while the Israeli government contends that Jews have the right to build and live anywhere in its eternal capital, “this particular part of Jerusalem is in most anybody’s vision of a possible peace settlement going to be part of Israel.”

Read the whole thing.

Let's go to the videotape.



Others slamming the Obama administration for its treatment of Israel include Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fl.), the leading Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee and Senator Sam Brownback (R-Kan.).

Israel Matzav: Boehner, McCain slam Obama