Not surprisingly, Obama doubled down on his message of moral equivalence between Israel and the so-called Palestinians in his UN General Assembly speech.  Yes, he tossed out some politically motivated bromides about our deep friendship with Israel, but overall, he continued to view the two sides equally.

Obama’s overarching theme was that peace in the Middle East is “so hard” to achieve.  He asserted that there will be no peace unless “each side learns to stand in each other’s shoes,” and they “sit down together, to listen to each other, and to understand each other’s hopes and fears.”  As he uttered these puerile platitudes, I was attempting to conjure up an image of such a conversation.  It would go something like this:

Hamas/Fatah guy: “I fear those Jews and their settlements with every fiber of my being.  There will be no Jews living in our state, nor will they live in the remaining parts of Israel, once we inevitably destroy them.  Oh, how I hope all those homes will be within missile range.  Oh, how I regret that I have but one body to blow up for my religion.”

Israeli:  “Oh, how I fear for my children, while missiles fly over their schools.  Oh, how I hope there comes a day when Palestinians will love their children more than they hate us; when they will allow Jews to live peacefully and prosperously in “their” land, as they do in ours.”

As you can see, it’s quite arduous to have a productive dialogue here.  In that sense, Obama is right about how difficult it is to achieve peace.  As Human Events’s John Hayward wrote on Twitter, “Peace is hard. But dancing and handing out candy after 9/11 is easy.  Why would Palestinians want to take Obama’s advice and walk in Israeli shoes?  They might get blown up by a suicide bomb or rocket attack.”  Yet, in Obama’s perverted sense of morality, he believes, ” that [the] truth [is] – that each side has legitimate aspirations.”  Yup, one side wants to build homes; one side wants to build bombs.

The reason why Obama is so blinded by the truth in the Middle East is because he fundamentally rejects the notion that there is an Islamic terror threat.  Throughout the entire speech, he failed to mention the word terrorism, or even milder liberal innuendo, such as “extremism.”  Instead, he pinned all of the world’s problems on “nuclear weapons (including our own; hence, START treaty) and poverty; ignorance and disease,” along with global warming, unbridled capitalism, and a lack of LGTB rights.

Obama’s only problem with Syria and Iran, the world’s foremost exporters of terror, is their autocratic form of government (even though he had no problem with Ahmadinejad’s bloody suppression in 2009).  As such, he praised all of the “democratic” uprisings in the Middle East, without mentioning the extremists in Libya, the anti-Israel violence in Egypt, and the Al-Qaeda takeover of Yemen.  It’s as if our consummate mission in the Middle East is to end autocracy, while blithely ignoring the Islamic threat to us and our allies.

This perverse worldview also sheds light on Obama’s tepid prosecution of the war in Afghanistan.  We are fighting aimlessly and taking record causalities against an enemy that he is simultaneously negotiating with.  Well, now we understand why things aren’t going well.  We are “fighting” for faux-democracy for undemocratic people, while ignoring the larger Islamic threat.  Concurrently, we are making more progress in Iraq, but our soldiers are still being attacked by Iranian-made bombs.  Obama has nothing to say about Iran on that front either.  Nevertheless, he triumphantly declared, “we are poised to end these wars from a position of strength.”  Nope – not as long as he is president.

This is why Republicans need to focus more on foreign policy in some of the debates, even though the economy is the major issue of the campaign.  They need to draw a bold-colored distinction between Obama’s foreign policy driven by dastardly moral equivalence and one that is purveyed by peace through strength, moral clarity, American exceptionalism, and most importantly, defining the enemy.

During his UN speech, Obama proclaimed, “And it is precisely because we believe so strongly in the aspirations of the Palestinian people that America has invested so much time and effort in the building of a Palestinian state, and the negotiations that can achieve one.”

Our Republican nominee must enunciate clearly that it is precisely because we believe so strongly in the aspirations of Americans and our allies to live free of Islamic terror that America will stop investing so much time and effort in a Palestinian terror state – and start investing in defeat of Islamic terror.