Obama tightens the screws on Iran - again.

Lots of people seem to believe that President Obama is anti-Israel, or at least, not terribly pro-Israel. Although I'm not an American citizen, and, indeed, don't live in the US, so I'm not as close to the US media as many who make this comment, I've yet to see anything that shows that he is less pro-Israel than his recent predecessors. On the contrary, he is always stressing, in my view, his support for Israel to exist in peace and security. I could, for example, post his address to both Houses of the British Parliament of 25 May, 2011, where he makes this point (among others), concerning the right of Israel to exist in peace and security and also that it faces existential threats to that existence; his speech to the UN on 21 September last, where he specifically, again, addresses this matter; or, perhaps, his Rosh Hashonah message of 27 September 2011, despite the the rather nasty comments that start off the list below the YouTube video - most of which appear to be from the usual anti-Israel, anti-Obama and, indeed, anti-African-American crowd.

However, I'm not going to post those (though, if you don't have them, I'm happy to provide links to them), but rather, the brief email message from JTA that popped into my inbox this pm. It's all of 5 paragraphs long, two of those consisting of one sentence and a third of two whole, but short, sentences. The meat of the report is the following:

President Obama expanded Iran sanctions to include parties dealing with Iran's Central Bank.The executive order made public Monday and issued by the White House on Sunday cuts Iran's economy off from the United States' entirely by expanding existing sanctions to include those who deal with Iran's Central Bank, forcing interlocutors to choose between the two countries.

On the face of it, of course, this has nothing to do with Israel. But, as we all know, the immediate target of any Iranian nuclear warhead would be Israel. This is despite some commentators claiming that Ahmanedinejad really has the Arab world's oil fields in his sights. Why? Arab oil states he is politically opposed to: that's just politics, and he can possibly be rational about that. However, as a paid-up member of the antisemites league of nations, Israel he hates (and the rest of the world's Jews aren't far behind), so Israel, on past behaviour, would be his first target. Anything that slows him down has to be good.

I just feel sorry for the democrats, anti-Aytollahs and trade unionists who are targeted, imprisoned, tortured and killed by the current Iranian regime. The innocent suffer along with the guilty, especially while the free world's progressive leftists fail to see anything wrong with these clerical-fascist regimes, and nothing right with the democratic Israel.

The full (if brief) report is here.

By Brian Goldfarb.