From the president’s press conference this morning:
Q Thank you, Mr. President. It’s a very busy time. If I may, I’d like to ask you about two other important issues in the news. Republican candidates have taken aim at your approach to foreign policy, particularly the Middle East and Israel, and accused you of appeasement. I wanted to get your reaction to that…
THE PRESIDENT: Ask Osama bin Laden and the 22-out-of-30 top al Qaeda leaders who’ve been taken off the field whether I engage in appeasement. Or whoever is left out there, ask them about that…
Of course, this is a response to the spectacle of six Republican presidential candidates appearing before the Republican Jewish Coalition in Washington, D.C. yesterday and uniformly accusing the president of appeasing Iran and the Palestinians. It shouldn’t need to be said, but the word “appeasement” calls to mind the actions of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain at the Munich Conference in 1938. When he let Adolf Hitler take over Czechoslovakia without a fight, he lost his last opportunity to stop World War Two and the Holocaust. Using such loaded language to describe the president in front of a Jewish audience is both tasteless and outrageous.
It’s nice to see the president push back forcibly on that kind of rhetoric.
