Conor Cruise O’Brien once defined an intellectual as “someone who can admit when someone else has scored a point in a debate.” If one can never admit or even consider what those on the other side of any particular political or ideological divide are saying one is nothing more than a political hack and no one should pay any attention to anything he says. 

In these pages and elsewhere I have been very critical of President Obama’s approach to the Palestinian-Israel conflict. In addition I have been critical of the amount of time President Obama kept his hand futilely extended to Iran as its nuclear program hummed along.

Yet it is now clear that President Obama was not quite the patsy with respect to Iran’s nuclear program that his public stance would have suggested. A front-page piece in the January 16 New York Times details at length the degree of cooperation between the United States and Israel in the production of the Stuxnet virus that has done such damage to Iran’s nuclear program. Though that cooperation began during the Bush administration it reached its crescendo under President Obama. The Stuxnet virus was at least as effective as an Israeli military strike would likely have been and without the collateral damage that such a strike would have entailed including terrorist retaliation around the world and political isolation for Israel.

The damage rendered by Stuxnet to Iran’s Natanz enrichment facility has not permanently derailed Iran’s nuclear program. Nor has the need to retain a military option against Iran’s nuclear program become moot. But at the very least it has provided a year or two more to ratchet up sanctions versus Iran in the hopes of bringing down Ahmadinejad and the mullahs before a military confrontation becomes inevitable.

The degree of cooperation between the American and Israeli intelligence services outlined by the Times is highly unusual for any two governments even close allies. And it demonstrates that those who charged that the Obama administration had accepted the inevitability of a nuclear Iran myself included were wrong.

As long as we are passing out bouquets to those of whom we have been critical in the past let us not forget Secretary of State Hilary Clinton’s unusually frank speech in Qatar two weeks ago. Without respect for human rights improved business climates and an end to pervasive corruption she warned the Middle East’s Arab regimes will “increasingly turn towards radicalism and violence that will bleed outside of the region [and threaten] the rest of the world.” 

Those words constituted an implicit repudiation of the linkage doctrine that has been repeatedly articulated by every top Obama administration official from the president down according to which resolution of the Palestinian-Israel conflict holds the key to solving all the region’s pathologies. Not once during her speech did Clinton veer from her focus on the internal failures of Arab regimes and the connection between those failures and the attraction of radical Islam. She did not throw out any bromides to her largely Arab audience about the necessity of creating a Palestinian state before Arab states could possibly be expected to undertake internal reform. 

Fouad Ajami noted in the Wall Street Journal that the speech represented another sharp policy reversal. Everywhere that she visited in the Gulf States Clinton met with representatives of civil society groups in order to drive home her message that the creation of a democratic civil society is the precondition for the emergence of Arab states from their current backwardness.

In doing so she effectively adopted President George W. Bush’s vision of a “new Middle East” which had been so ridiculed by the Obama foreign policy team and blamed for much of the animosity towards the United States in the Muslim world. Bush’s own vision was influenced by Natan Sharansky’s The Case for Democracy which emphasized the crucial importance of the development of civil society in which citizens can express their views in the town square without fear. 

Until now according to Ajami the Obama administration had effectively accepted a doctrine of Arab exceptionalism which posited the inevitability of tyranny in Islamic countries. That approach was reflected most notably in the “moral and strategic failure” of refusing to strongly condemn the Ahmadinejad regime’s brutal suppression of popular protests over its election chicanery. And in the Obama administration’s passivity in the face of the Syrian regime’s systematic reversal of the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon. Rather than confront the Syrians over their reentry into Lebanon via Hizbullah the United States has returned its ambassador and been engaged in constant efforts to repair ties with Syria.

In this context Clinton’s Qatar Speech suggests a retreat from two failed aspects of the Obama administration’s Middle East diplomacy that is as welcome as it is surprising.

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Back to President Obama. He hit a fat pitch down the middle of the plate out of the park with his speech following the Tucson shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in which six people including a federal judge and a nine-year-old girl born on 9/11 were killed. The speech allowed Obama to reclaim the mantle of the great unifier transcending partisan divisions for the first time since his election.

The president was able to position himself effectively in opposition to the wild rantings from the left-wing of his own party most notably those of New York Times columnist Paul Krugman who sought to pin the blame for the attempted assassination on Sarah Palin and Tea Party activists. Even as he admitted that nothing was yet known about the motivations of the would-be assassin Krugman insisted that the climate of verbal violence aroused by Tea Party activists was to blame. (This from someone who has without embarrassment described his hanging of an effigy of President George W. Bush at a celebratory 2008 election night party.)

The shooter Jared Loughner turned out to have virtually no interest in politics. According to at least one friend he carried a grudge against Giffords for what he deemed an inadequate response to a question he asked her in a 2007 public forum: If words have no meaning what is mathematics? Not exactly the issue foremost on the mind of Tea Party activists.

The ugliness of the accusations perfectly set the stage for President Obama to present himself as thoughtful and conciliatory in contrast. In an almost explicit rebuke to his more rabid supporters he denied that “a simple lack of civility caused this tragedy” and urged Americans not to “use this tragedy as one more occasion to turn on one another.” “At a time when we are far too eager to lay blame for all that ails us at the feet of people who think differently than we do” the president called on Americans to respond to the tragedy by expanding “our moral imagination [in order] to listen to each other more carefully [and] to sharpen our instincts for empathy.”

Fine sentiments all and popular ones as well. The speech sent Obama's popularity to the highest levels since the start of the health-care debates.

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The primary victim of the wild accusations of culpability for the shootings was Sarah Palin though she went unmentioned by name in President Obama's speech. But that plucky lady needs no one to defend her. She issued a statement criticizing journalists and pundits who within hours of an unfolding tragedy were quick to “manufacture a blood libel that only served to incite the very hatred and violence they purport to condemn.”

Their original charges having been thoroughly rebutted (primarily) Jewish sufferers from Palin Derangement Syndrome including David Harris of the partisan National Jewish Democratic Council pounced on Palin for appropriating the term “blood libel” in her defense. Doing so they argued either showed ignorance of the provenance of the term in medieval charges that Jews use the blood of Christian children in baking matzos gross insensitivity or both.

Both claims were nonsense. Nothing in Palin’s statement gave any indication of whether she knew the history of the so-called “blood libel.” Nor does it really matter since the term has been widely appropriated as a metaphor for claims of vicious behavior without any basis in fact. While Jewish writers might primarily apply the metaphor to claims made against Israel or Jews — e.g. Palestinian claims that the IDF murdered thousands of Palestinians in Jenin during Operation Defensive Shield or the Mohammed al-Dura hoax — it has long ceased to be applied only to charges against Jews.

The metaphor was apt for Palin who had been accused of having the blood of the Tucson victims on her hands without a scintilla of evidence.

Some events should never be used as a metaphor. The use of the term Holocaust to describe anything other than the systematic ideologically driven attempt by the Nazis to exterminate the entire Jewish People employing all the efficiency of modern technology inevitably trivializes the Holocaust to which there is no comparable historical event.

But the use of the term blood libel when applied to similarly wild and ungrounded charges functions in an opposite fashion: It serves as a constant reminder of the venomous charges made against Jews throughout the ages.

The treatment of Palin by American Jews and Jewish groups is indefensible and demonstrates their own lack of concern for Jewish interests. Palin has consistently been one of the most ardent defenders of Israel and she wields a great deal of influence over millions of American Christians who share her views. Given the alacrity of the Jewish attacks on her who could blame her if she were to ask: What kind of people consistently pay back good with bad and show such little gratitude for those who mean them only good?