President Obama’s National Security Advisor Susan Rice displayed both poor diplomatic skills and a distinct distaste for the Israeli state when she openly denigrated Israel’s Ambassador to the United States to an American Jewish leader.
During a recent meeting with Rice, the Jewish leader reportedly asked why she hadn’t met with Ambassador Ron Dermer.
‘He never asked to meet me,’” Haaretz reported Rice as sarcastically saying, according to The Washington Free Beacon. “Besides, I understood that he’s too busy traveling to Sheldon Adelson’s events in Las Vegas.”
According to the Beacon:
Rice, Haaretz reported, “was referring to Dermer’s exceptional attendance as guest of honor at a gathering of the Republican Jewish Coalition in March.
That event served to prove to Obama’s aides that despite the ‘new leaf’ Dermer had promised when he arrived in Washington only a few months earlier, he continued to dabble in American domestic politics as a sympathizer with the red, Republican side.”
This report comes within a week of Jeffrey Goldberg, diplomatic correspondent for The Atlantic, writing that an unnamed senior Obama official referred to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a “chickens**t.”
Netanyahu responded by saying that he was verbally attacked for defending his country, according to The Jerusalem Post.
“Our vital interests, first and foremost our security and a unified Jerusalem, are not the uppermost interests of the unnamed officials who attacked our government and me personally,” the prime minister said in a speech to the Knesset. “I’m being attacked simply because I defend the State of Israel … Despite all the attacks against me, I will keep defending our country and Israel’s people.”
Tonight the Israeli prime minister’s eyes will be glued to Fox News, watching the election returns and “rooting for the Republicans,” Haartez reported. Is it any wonder?