Bolton: Most Anti-Israeli Speech By Any US President Ever.

When Jon Bolton and Glenn Beck get together you know that lunacy lies ahead, as each seems to outdo the other in terms of the madness they exhibit.

Beck begins by pretending to throw a frog into boiling water. I presume he thinks he's making some cryptic point, but in the end, like much of what Beck does, one is struck simply by the oddness of it all.

I would honestly have thought that things couldn't get any odder from that point onwards, but they both managed to easily outdo the frog business by showing their utter lack of understanding of international law.

Beck, for instance, objected to Obama referring to Israel's occupation of the Palestinians as an "occupation".

Beck: "Occupation that began in 1967." That's weird. There was a war. They won.

Beck is either the dumbest ass ever to address this issue or he's simply being disingenuous. I suspect the former.

The fact that one can't keep land acquired by war is clearly stated in UN Resolution 242 (PDF):

"Emphasising the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war."

But Bolton's astonishment at what Obama has just said, in what he describes as "the most radical, anti-Israeli speech I can recall any president making", comes down to this:

Bolton: Two phrases in what you just heard. The president says America does not accept - and I am quoting now - "the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements". Not new Israeli settlements, continued Israeli settlements. Which... this is Mr Wordsmith here... that calls into question, in my mind, all Israeli settlements.

The very fact that they are both sitting there pretending that all Israeli settlements are not illegal means that they haven't the faintest clue as to what international law says in this regard.

Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention:

The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.

Although, I suspect Bolton knows fine well what international law says, he simply doesn't feel that international law should apply to Israel. Beck is simply a moron on this subject, as he is on so many others.

Bolton: Then he says, that we want "a Palestinian state that is contiguous". By the way, Gaza and the West Bank were never contiguous Palestinian areas before. And "that ends the occupation that began in 1967." That means, I think, a return to the 1967 borders.

Again, a return to the 1967 borders is only controversial if one thinks that international law should not apply to Israel, as that is the entire point of UN Resolution 242: That Israel "withdraws from territories occupied in the recent conflict".

They then pretend that a "contiguous" Palestinian state would mean that there couldn't be a contiguous state of Israel.

All that is needed to make the West Bank and Gaza "contiguous" is a road or a railway link between the two. That road or railway could be elevated so that both Israel and Palestine have contiguous states, but this concept is obviously too complex for these two bozos to comprehend.

But Beck's ignorance is especially a thing to behold. He actually asks Bolton where the 1967 border would be, proving that he knows almost nothing about this issue.

Bolton insists that this is the most anti-Israeli speech ever. But, in reality, what got Obama these rounds of applause at the United Nations was the fact that he made it clear that he was going to make sure that international law was applied in this dispute. Bolton thinks that this amounts to Obama being a lawyer for the Palestinians, and he actually laments that this should be happening when the Palestinians find themselves in such a weak position. I suppose Bolton feels that, at such a time, the Israelis should be allowed to press home their advantage.

Of course, what Bolton misses is that allowing Israel to do this would not result in peace, even if it resulted in a victory of sorts for the Likud movement, and lasting peace is what we are supposed to be seeking here. But Bolton has been fighting for Israel's corner for so long that this concept is literally lost on him.

Bolton notes the warm reception which Obama received at the UN, the place that Bolton has famously said that he does not believe in, and one can't help thinking that the warm applause Obama received merely emphasises just how out of touch with world opinion Bolton and Beck actually are; and just how in touch with it President Obama has shown himself to be.

Both Beck and Bolton come across as dinosaurs, yearning for the day when the US told the world that they could all bugger off; and that Israel, backed by the US, would do whatever it bloody wanted when it came to it's dispute with Palestine. They fail to comprehend that the attitude which they yearn for was the very thing which made the US hated around the globe and that it is Obama's specific rebuttal of their core beliefs which have earned him the world's respect.

To counter the fact that they are both so out of touch with the world's view on this matter Beck comes up with the oh-so-expected false charge of anti-Semitism:

Beck: Do you think it's possible to sit in a church with somebody who is as anti-Semitic as Jeremiah Wright is and not come away with an anti-Semitic view?

We could have seen that coming a mile off. They simply find it impossible to believe that anyone could be asking that international law be obeyed. Indeed, Bolton has spent most of his adult life arguing against the very concept of international law which Obama has stood up for.

As I say, Bolton and Beck come across as dinosaurs. Perhaps their world view should have gone into the boiling water instead of the frog.

They display the mindset of the Bush years and they can't understand why no-one else misses it in the way they do.

Tags: Beck, Bolton, Israel, Palestine, Obama