3/21/13, "Gaza Rockets Mar Obama's Israel Visit," ABC News
"The first rocket, launched just after 7 a.m., hit a house. Photos from
the scene showed broken glass and stone, while the second rocket landed
in a field."I wish this was merely damage to property but my eight-year-old daughter and my wife are terrified," Yossi Haziza, whose house was hit, told The Associated Press. "We just want to live in peace. We don't want to keep having to run to bomb shelters.""...via Atlas Shrugs. Photo of damage by Palestinian rocket to a house in Israel during Obama visit, AFP/getty
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3/11/13, "600 lucky students to hear Obama speak in Jerusalem," ynet news, Itamar Eichner
"It’s a once-in-a-lifetime event, students from all the universities will compete to be there: Obama’s Israel address. US Embassy will give 20 tickets to people who post creative statuses on Facebook."
"US President Barack Obama will make a historic visit to the International Convention Center in Jerusalem where he is scheduled to address Israeli youth....
People are expected to battle it out for a chance to touch Obama glory.
Obama’s Israel address is expected to be the height of the upcoming presidential visit. The White House and the US Embassy have arranged for the services of an Israeli production company, which is assisting in planning and promoting the event. The goal? To reach all the Israeli universities this week and let them know the number of students each can send to the happening."...
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3/21/13, "President Obama Hails 'Twilight of Israel's Founding Generation'," IsraelNationalnews.com, by Gil Ronin
"U.S. President Barack Obama addressed a young audience in Jerusalem Thursday afternoon with a message that some will see as inspiring, and others as incitement....
"Obama then went on to speak about the need for establishing a state of Palestine with viable borders, so that Israel could achieve peace. The audience applauded loudly and no dissenting voices could be heard.
Improvising at times and receiving warm applause throughout his speech, Obama eventually reached the point at which he called on Israelis to put pressure on their own government. "Political leaders do not take risks if their people do not push them to take risks," he said. "You must create the change that you want to see. Your voices must be louder than those who would drown out hope."...
He called upon them, in effect, to rise
up against their own leadership. "It is up to you," he said....
Obama's direct messages to Israel's younger citizens will probably be
used by the Israeli left wing to rekindle the "social protests" that
destabilized Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's previous government in
2011....The protests created pressure on Netanyahu to abandon certain free market principles and caused a loss in investor confidence."...via Atlas Shrugs
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3/21/13, "Gaza rockets slam southern Israel during Obama visit," haaretz.com, by Amos Harel and Barak Ravid
"One rocket damages the backyard of a home in southern Israeli town of Sderot, second rocket hits open area near town; no casualties were reported; Ya'alon closes border crossing; Abbas: We condemn all violence against civilians."
"Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon has ordered the closure of the Kerem Shalom border crossing between Israel and Gaza, after two rockets fired from the Strip exploded in the southern Israeli town of Sderot early Thursday. The rockets were fired as U.S. President Barack Obama was beginning the second day of his first visit to the country as president. The rockets exploded near the border with the Gaza Strip, causing damage to one house. No casualties were reported.
A second rocket exploded in an open area in Sderot. Two other rocket launches were detected by the IDF, but landed in Gaza."...
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Notice was taken that Obama excluded one particular Israeli university's students from "competing" for tickets to get to see him. Also that Obama chose not to speak at the Knesset:
3/20/13, "4 congressmen decry Obama's exclusion of Ariel U.," jpost.com, Lazaroff, Ziri
"Four Republican congressmen have written a letter to US President Barack Obama to protest the exclusion of Ariel University students from the speech he is scheduled to deliver on Thursday.
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Out of Israel’s eight accredited universities, Ariel is the only one that is located in the West Bank. Students from the other seven universities were invited to the speech to be delivered at Jerusalem’s International Convention Center.
The letter, penned by Representative Bill Johnson (ROhio), also took issue with Obama’s decision not to address the Knesset during this week’s visit to Israel, as his predecessors George W. Bush and Bill Clinton did when they visited the country during their tenures in the White House. It was also signed by Republican representatives Jim Jordan and Brad Wenstrup of Ohio and John Fleming of Louisiana.
“We believe you understand the importance of addressing a nation’s parliament as you have taken the time to address members of parliament in the United Kingdom, Australia and Ghana,” said the letter. It noted that such an address is a “customary and symbolic gesture that celebrates our shared democratic ideas and the special relationship between Israel and the US.”
The letter said that the congressmen understood that Obama had chosen instead to address students, a move that it said was “commendable and encouraged.”
However, the congressmen said, “we are disappointed to learn that students from the University of Ariel, located in the West Bank town of Ariel, did not receive an invitation to hear you speak. Especially since the University of Ariel is the first beyond the Green Line, and is officially and legally recognized by the Government of Israel.”...
Levy and dozens of Ariel University students held a vigil outside the US consulate in Jerusalem on Tuesday afternoon to protest their exclusion from Thursday’s speech. Participants held life-size silhouettes marked with a red X to represent their exclusion from Obama’s visit....
Kvatinsky added that Ariel’s exclusion shows Obama’s “lack of respect for the opinions of the citizens of Israel or the decision of the Israeli government, which has declared Ariel an accredited university.”"...
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3/23/13, "Obama encouraged Israelis to rebel," ynetnews, by Attila Somfalvi
"Op-ed: In Jerusalem speech, US president went over the head of a prime minister he does not trust."
"Try to imagine for a moment what would happen if Prime Minister Netanyahu would speak before American students at Columbia University and call on them to rise up and demand that their politicians block any gun control legislation or encourage the students to act determinedly against President Obama's health care law. What an uproar such an act would have caused in the US and the world over – and justifiably so. The prime minister of Israel, the headlines would say, is intervening in the most sensitive issues of American politics.
Obama took off his gloves during his speech in Jerusalem. In front of a captive and adoring audience, he called on young Israelis to wake up, stop being indifferent and take their future into their own hands. He urged them to prod their politicians into action and push them toward achieving peace with the Palestinians while not ignoring the facts related to demographics, security and the occupation. The call was perfectly packaged in thousands of beautiful words that evoked a sense of security and calm in every Israeli – mainly because they were spoken by the president of the United States."...
Ed. note: Obama likes to avoid adults when making his alleged big points. That's all that needs to be said about this. If it was such a great 'message' why not deliver it to working adults rather than a manipulated, hand picked group of young students in a room with reverb? I remember being a college student. Departing from the left's mantra was inconceivable. There was no chance objective information could've reached me. I marched for peace and wore a flower in my hair. I couldn't care less what people say to college students. Israel is surrounded by radical Islamic savages, a matter that calls for mature adult consideration. Adoring media coverage of this is complete bullshit.
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Lovesick Time Magazine lives in fantasy. Obama delivered a standard community organizing pitch to school kids who had to "compete" for tickets to see him. This was not a speech geared to peers, or even to adults. Time Magazine conflates a person with a deep voice who can read lines written for him on a teleprompter (ie, an actor) with a "master orator." Further, why not pay attention to Obama's many actions instead of a few words? Answer: because the time you spend talking about his speeches is time you don't spend talking about his actions.
3/21/13, "Can Obama Make Israelis Believe Again?" Time Magazine, Karl Vick
"The master orator brought all his skills to the Jerusalem address, braiding emotion, history, reassurance, logic and personal charisma into a speech that did to the audience what a really good Obama speech can be relied upon to do: It lifted them out of themselves, and made them think anything was possible. It was a stunning success, at least until his listeners return to the realities awaiting them right outside the auditorium (which stands behind the bus stop that was the scene of the last terror attack inside Jerusalem, a 2011 backpack bomb that killed one).
“He’s so good I loved it, even though I don’t agree with some of what he said,” says Gila Kordana, descending a staircase from the balcony in a crowd buzzing with the experience. Such as? “I’m not really for the idea of two states,” she says, not a small thing. Nor was she much taken with Obama’s take on the young Palestinians he’d seen earlier the same afternoon at the West Bank city of Al Bireh.
“Talking to them,” he (Obama) said, “they weren’t that different from my daughters. They weren’t that different from your daughters or sons.”
“My brother’s in the IDF [Israel Defense Forces], and they deal with nine-year-old kids who throw bottles,” Kordana says. “So I didn’t go for that part about them being just like us. ‘My daughters, your daughters, their daughters’,” Kordana says, paraphrasing Obama’s plea for “empathy” and seeing your own in the faces of the other: “You can’t put them in the same triangle.”"...
Farther down the article, mention that the audience "skewed young, Obama's sweet spot:"
"His audience in Jerusalem was invitation only, and skewed young, Obama’s sweet spot: Most came from universities inside Israel."...
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Ed. note: Commenters to the Time article sound infinitely smarter than the Time author (at least commenters showing at around 9:45pm ET, Thurs., 3/21/13).
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