January 12 Is the Bi-annual Boss-around-Condi Day in Israel.
Posted by saifedean on January 16, 2009
This Monday, January 12th, we heard the story that Israel’s Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was boasting to journalists about how he embarrassed US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rica by calling Bush and ordering him to order her to abstain from voting for a United Nations resolution which she had helped prepare.
“I said: ‘Get me President Bush on the phone,’” Olmert said in a speech in the southern Israeli city of Ashkelon. “They said he was in the middle of giving a speech in Philadelphia. I said I didn’t care: ‘I need to talk to him now.’ He got off the podium and spoke to me.”
Olmert said he argued that the United States should not vote in favor, and the president then called Rice and told her not to do so.
“She was left pretty embarrassed,” Olmert said.
This reminded me of another incident, which–amazingly enough–happened on the same date two years ago, when Condoleezza Rice went batshit crazy over some Norwegian district deciding to boycott Israeli goods.
See, the Norwegian region of Sor-Trondelag (population: 270,000) got so fed up with Israel’s apartheid in Palestine, that it decided it didn’t want any complicity in it, and that it wanted to work towards ending it using the same method employed by the global community against the apartheid regime in South Africa: boycott.
Boycotting South Africa was something that the whole world had largely gotten round to by the mid-1980’s. Except, of course, South African Apartheid’s faithful ally: Israel. Without a doubt, and by the admission of both apartheid and anti-apartheid leaders, it was the international campaign of boycott, divestments and sanctions that succeeded in ending racist rule in South Africa.
But whereas America sanctioned apartheid South Africa in the 1980’s, it today embraces faithfully apartheid Israel. In fact, it is so zealous in its defense of Israel’s right to continue to oppress Palestinians and steal their land, that it makes it an important part of its foreign policy to prevent other countries from ever sanctioning Israel.
And so Secretary Rice, on January 12, 2006, sent very stern angry letters to Norway threatening it with “serious political consequences” if Sor-Trondelag were to go ahead and stop buying whatever little crap it usually buys from Israel. The US Secretary of State actually saw that it was in the purview of her job to threaten hostility towards a perfectly peaceful, incredibly-rich, close ally and friend of the United States over some minor region’s choice of merchandise. This is probably what is referred to as an “active” foreign policy. George Washington would have been so proud.
But Karma, it seems, is a bitch and Rice was soon to get her cosmic retribution in the form of Ehud Olmert bragging to the world about how he had the President of The Free World call and boss her around in her own job.
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