Romney Knows Israel's Capital (And It's Enemies)

 

IBDEditorials.com

Foreign Policy: President Obama's "support" for Israel is so mealy-mouthed that his spokesman can't even say whether we recognize Jerusalem as its capital. Mitt Romney, on Israeli soil, offered a forceful alternative.

Nancy Pelosi's airheaded claims to the contrary last week, globe-trotting Barack Obama has never visited Israel as president.

That fact was not lost on Obama's GOP challenger Mitt Romney, speaking to the Jerusalem Foundation on Sunday, as he stood on soil where the current president of the United States for 3-1/2 years deliberately has chosen not to set foot.

"When the decision was before him in 1948, President Harry Truman decided without hesitation that the United States would be the first country to recognize the state of Israel," Romney pointed out, with the Old City of Jerusalem his backdrop.

Truman's move has made Americans and the Israelis since then "the most natural of allies."

Indeed, Romney declared that "Israel and America are in many respects reflections of one another" as comparatively new nations committed to representative government, the rule of law, rights bestowed on man by God, and free enterprise.

Unlike Obama's White House press secretary, who last week could not answer reporters' repeated questions about whether Jerusalem was the capital of Israel (see the transcript below), Romney stated simply and directly, "It is a deeply moving experience to be in Jerusalem, the capital of Israel."

More important, Romney used the occasion to show that if he is elected, America will likely take a more forceful role in the Middle East than even during the George W. Bush administration.

In addressing the global nightmare of a nuclear Islamofascist Iran, Romney quoted Menachem Begin, the Israeli prime minister who died in 1992, who said "in vivid and haunting words," as Romney put it, that "if an enemy of (the Jewish) people says he seeks to destroy us, believe him."

"Make no mistake," Romney warned, "the ayatollahs in Tehran are testing our moral defenses. They want to know who will object and who will look the other way."

The soon-to-be Republican nominee said, "My message to the people of Israel and the leaders of Iran is one and the same: I will not look away; and neither will my country."

What a contrast to Obama, who when speaking to American supporters of Israel in March absurdly claimed, "My administration's commitment to Israel's security has been unprecedented."

Yet he gave the first interview of his presidency to the Saudi-owned pan-Arab Al Arabiya TV channel, declaring that "my job to the Muslim world is to communicate that the Americans are not your enemy."

While Obama thinks Islamists can be made into America's friends, Romney declared, "We have a solemn duty and a moral imperative to deny Iran's leaders the means to follow through on their malevolent intentions. ... We should stand with all who would join our effort to prevent a nuclear-armed Iran — and that includes Iranian dissidents."

Going back to the Bush administration, we have been recommending that America publicly get on the side of the Iranian freedom fighters — the best way to end Tehran's nuclear weapons threat and gain Iranians' liberation from the ayatollahs. It looks like next year we might just have a president who understands this.

We hope by then it won't be too late.