Shortly before former President Barack Obama left the White House, he abstained from vetoing an anti-Israel UN Security Council resolution, something that all but ensured its passage.
The resolution blasted Israel for building houses for its citizens in the West Bank, territory which was captured during a war with Jordan in 1967. In allowing the resolution to pass, Obama broke a longstanding U.S. policy to protect the Jewish State from hostile one-sided resolutions at the international body and cemented his place as the most hated U.S. president in history among Israelis.
Obama later tried to explain his decision not to veto the resolution as one that was forced on him by Egypt, which had drafted the motion, making him unable to vote against his principles. Speaking with Jewish leaders in New York in 2018, Obama said that the vote came “toward the end of my term, when the Egyptians drafted yet another declaration with respect to settlement construction.”
Media reports said the same. “The idea had been circulating at the Security Council for months, but the abrupt timing was a surprise,” wrote the Washington Post. “Amid his morning workout, an afternoon round of golf and a family dinner with friends, President Obama interrupted his Hawaii vacation to consult by phone with his top national security team in Washington.”
According to the newspaper, “Obama was open to abstaining, he said on the call, provided the measure was ‘balanced’ in its censure of terrorism and Palestinian violence and there were no last-minute changes in the text. Skeptics, including Vice President Biden, warned of fierce backlash in Congress and in Israel itself.”
His remarks did little to mollify Israel’s leadership, who suspected that the Obama administration was heavily involved in passing the security council resolution from behind the scene.
These suspicions have now been confirmed as accurate. A senior Obama aide recently told The New York Times that not only was Obama in favor of the resolution, he worked closely with Egypt to make sure that it was proposed after the 2016 election in order to avoid damaging Hillary Clinton at the polls.
“We didn’t want Clinton to face pressure to condemn the resolution or be damaged by having to defend it,” said the official. We now know that not only did Obama throw Israel to the wolves, but he or his people played a senior role in creating the resolution in the first place.
The unintended consequences of the aforementioned UN vote still reverberate today, as it was the beginning of former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn’s legal troubles. Desperately trying to scuttle the resolution, President-Elect Donald Trump dispatched Flynn to call the Russian UN Ambassador and ask him to vote against the motion.
According to a Mueller filing in December, Flynn later lied to FBI agents when he told them that he had not spoken to Russian diplomatic officials prior to the UN vote, as well as withholding the time in which he discussed American sanctions on Russia with Moscow’s ambassador to Washington.
Flynn’s remarks later led to his resignation and his subsequent guilty plea and decision to cooperate with the Mueller probe, something which has reportedly left the decorated officer more than $5 million in debt due to legal fees.
With the former Obama administration official’s admission coming the same week the Mueller probe ended, it’s important to remember the treachery towards America’s allies that characterized the Obama years, a practice that has now thankfully been reversed by President Trump.
