Obama on Israel: deflection or duplicitousness?

Face it, the Obama administration had a truly awful week and his friends in the media were on the attack.

Feeling the attacks, President Obama may have gone on the attack against one of his favorite whipping boys, Israel.

On Wednesday, hours before Secret Service Director Julia Pierson was to announce her resignation, Bibi Netanyahu went to the White House for a scheduled meeting to discuss ISIS and the Iran nuclear talks, but in the traditional pre-meeting words to the press Obama expanded the public scope of the meeting taking the opportunity to reprimand Israel.

“I think we also recognize that we have to find ways to change the status quo so that both Israeli citizens are safe in their own homes and schoolchildren in their schools from the possibility of rocket fire, but also that we don’t have the tragedy of Palestinian children being killed as well. And so we’ll discuss extensively both the situation of rebuilding Gaza but also how can we find a more sustainable peace between Israelis and Palestinians.”

The issues raised are not new concerns of the President, but his mention of civilian casualties seemed a bit strange as it came the day after Yahoo News reported that at least for the Iraq and Syria bombing campaigns, Obama was loosening the rules meant to prevent US forces from harming civilians.

The White House has acknowledged for the first time that strict standards President Obama imposed last year to prevent civilian deaths from U.S. drone strikes will not apply to U.S. military operations in Syria and Iraq.

The Yahoo report incited criticism from both left wing and right wing commentators (Washington Post and National Review for example) who saw the move as disingenuous coming only a few weeks after the Administration used terms like “appalled” and “disgraceful” in reacting to civilian deaths during Israel’s recent Operation Protective Edge.