RUTHFULLY YOURS

Right before Monday’s meeting between U.S. President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House, the two leaders gave perfunctory opening statements to the press.Due to their famously strained relations, which hit rock bottom when Netanyahu addressed Congress in March, the much-touted tete-a-tete has been leading the news in Israel for reasons beyond the aid package and Palestinians.

To sweeten the pot for Netanyahu detractors gleefully awaiting another Obama hissy fit, a pre-trip scandal erupted over the appointment of Ran Baratz as public diplomacy czar. Netanyahu’s selection of Baratz to fill this role caused an international stir when it emerged that the person about to make Israel’s case to the world had spent years posting very undiplomatic diatribes on Facebook against both U.S. and Israeli officials.

So, when Obama and Netanyahu exchanged pleasantries and spoke a few scripted lines prior to meeting privately, everyone — myself included — was hanging on their every nuance for clues. And leave it to Obama to provide a whopper of a glimpse into the workings of his mind.

Jerusalem – I want to explain why I am in Israel.

I am here with 450 American (and a German and a Canadian) listeners to my radio show. About 400 are non-Jews.

We are here on a “Stand with Israel” tour organized by the syndicator of my radio show, the Salem Radio Network. I am accompanied by my wife, my producer Allen Estrin and his wife, and my radio colleague Mike Gallagher.

#ad#​People frustrated with the direction of America and the direction of the world regularly ask: “What can I do to make any difference?”

Here is one of the best answers I know: visit Israel. And do so especially when there are terror attacks.

If every time there were a spate of attacks on Israel, few people canceled their trips to Israel in response or — if I may imagine a much better world than the one we live in — tourism to Israel actually increased, three huge things would be achieved.

It was doubtful that the University of Missouri would stand up to a left-wing pressure campaign targeting its president, but when the football team joined the campaign, it was all over.

Missouri is an SEC school, where even a mediocre football program — Mizzou is 1-5 against the rest of the conference — has formidable financial and cultural power.

If anyone running the university had any guts, the school would have told the team, “Come back and talk to us when you can beat sad-sack Vanderbilt, or at least score more than three points against them.” Given the team’s performance, the proper rejoinder to its threatened boycott should have been, “How would anyone notice?”

Instead, Tim Wolfe, the president of the University of Missouri system, is out in one of the most parodic PC meltdowns on a college campus to date. The Missouri episode shows how the political climate on campus falls somewhere between a Tom Wolfe novel, a Monty Python skit, and the French Terror.

Hysterical Yalies protest a free-speech panel.
New Haven, Conn. — Really, Yale — you shouldn’t have! All this for little ol’ me?

It wasn’t really for little ol’ me, in fact. On Friday, I was honored to be a guest of the William F. Buckley Jr. Program at Yale, where I participated in a panel on freedom of speech with the wonderful writer Harry Stein and Professor Bradley A. Smith, a noted law scholar. The Yale kids did their screaming best to prevent us from having a conversation about free speech — the Yale kids are utterly immune to irony — but the event went much as planned. Coming and going, we were chanted at by idiot children screaming, “Genocide is not a joke!”

Of course it isn’t. Yale kids, on the other hand . . .

For the first several years of my life, I thought that “Yale man” was a synonym for “caveman,” because the only references to Yale I’d ever heard were from Thurston Howell III, who greeted displays of barbarism with “Heavens! A Yale man!” I thought of that when the police officer was obliged to carry the shrieking protester out of the venue where he’d come to put a stop to our free-speech discussion.

What senior Hamas figure Musa Abu Marzouk and other Hamas leaders are saying is very clear: Even if a Palestinian state is established in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and east Jerusalem, Hamas and other Palestinians will continue to fight until Israel is completely destroyed.

Hamas is openly stating that it will use any future Palestinian state as a launching pad to attack and eliminate Israel.

Hamas is not a small opposition party in the Palestinian territories that can be dismissed as a minor player. Hamas is a large Islamist movement, an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood that controls the entire Gaza Strip with its population of 1.8 million Palestinians. Hamas, not much different than Islamic State and Al-Qaeda, has its own security forces, militias, weapons and government institutions.

The Obama Administration and Western governments can talk as much as they like about the two-state solution. Even if President Abbas agrees to a Palestinian state, he will never be able to persuade Hamas, Islamic Jihad and many other Palestinians to recognize Israel’s right to exist.

Obama’s hostility to Israel usually plays out in a good cop-bad cop routine. As the top dog in a political party that still wants Jewish votes, he does not deliver bellicose anti-Israel speeches from balconies. Instead he leaves that to “bad cops” like Hillary Clinton, who described her role as the “designated yeller” at Netanyahu back in her Secretary of State days, and Joe Biden.

While Netanyahu and Obama had another bland White House session whose only purpose was to show that they can sit together in the same room without yelling at each other, the passive-aggressive attacks from Obama Inc. didn’t stop.

Biden is Obama’s go-to guy for starting incidents with Israel even during the Hillary days. Not much has changed now as Netanyahu’s visit was preceded by a Biden speech ranting that, “There is no excuse, there should be no tolerance for any member or employee of the Israeli administration referring to the president of United States in derogatory terms. Period, period, period, period!”

That’s four periods. If you’re counting.