TORONTO — When Caroline Glick analyzes the U.S. response to the convulsions rocking the Arab world, she’s shocked by what she sees.

Caroline Glick

“You can’t be too blunt about it. They’ve been siding with their worst enemies against their friends… It’s absolutely a disaster.”

Glick, a columnist and deputy managing editor of the Jerusalem Post, said Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s reference to Syrian strongman Bashar Assad as “a reformer” – at the same time his forces were attacking rebels – “shows how demented foreign policy has become under [U.S. President Barack] Obama.”

On April 5, Glick was the keynote speaker of a lecture dedicated to the late philanthropist and businessman Izzy Kaplan at Beth Avraham Yoseph of Thornhill (BAYT).

Glick said she met Kaplan a few years ago when the two co-operated in trying to prevent the evacuation of Israeli communities from Gaza. “That was a humanitarian disaster and a strategic folly,” she said. It permitted Hamas to take power and “it transformed 10,000 of the most productive Israelis into refugees.”

Glick’s topic for her address at BAYT was the Arab revolt and its implications for Israel. The evening was sponsored by Mizrachi Canada, the Toronto Zionist Council and the Committee for the Security of Sderot, with proceeds from the evening going to the Mishkan Shalom Synagogue in Sderot, which will be renamed for Kaplan.

Sderot is the community near Gaza that has experienced thousands of rocket attacks since Israel’s withdrawal. Rocket and mortar attacks have increased in recent months. At the same time, Jerusalem was hit by a bomb attack and five members of a single family were murdered in Itamar.

Glick said the perpetrators “saw the opportunity to kill Jews and they took it. That’s what they do.”

From a tactical sense, it also permits Iran and Syria, which control Hamas and which intimidates Fatah, the main group behind the Palestinian Authority, to “divert international attention from their countries.”

“You can’t look at the Palestinians and pretend they’re independent,” she said. “They’re not. Fatah is afraid of Iranian intimidation, which is huge. And Iran trains Fatah units through Hezbollah.

“The West gives a lot of money [to Fatah] for nothing. It’s its worst strategic investment,” she said.

Looking at the U.S. response to developments in the region, Glick noted that in Egypt, the Americans abandoned their ally of 30 years, Hosni Mubarak, in favour of an opposition that includes the radical Muslim Brotherhood; it bombed Libyan forces to support rebels that have been “penetrated” by Al Qaeda; and it is ignoring the Iranian-led Shiite insurrection in Bahrain, home to the United States’ Sixth Fleet.

Glick, who served as co-ordinator of negotiations with the Palestine Liberation Organization from 1994 to 1996, said U.S. abdication of its longstanding role in the region is because “Obama’s worldview is anti-imperialist, which essentially means anti-American. Therefore, he sides with U.S. opponents.”

With the neo-conservatives the primary opposition in the U.S., the result “when these two opposing schools fight” is that “U.S. strategic discourse has been completely irrational. If you see the Muslim Brotherhood as Solidarity [the Polish labour movement that helped bring down Communism], it shows you completely misconstrue the politics.”

Turning to events in Syria, Glick said Israel should try to support the overthrow of the Assad regime any way it can. The Kurds, who oppose the central authority, are natural allies and Israel should encourage them in their fight for a decentralized government. “The more centralized the government, the worse for Israel,” she said. “The more tyrannical, the more apt they are to use hatred of Israel and Jews to galvanize people to their side.”

Glick believes “Israel and others are going to step into the breach and start giving rational leadership to the region until a more serious U.S. leadership emerges.”

It also means Israel will now have to look at Egypt as a potential military adversary and “expand the size of the Israel Defence Force’s manpower and platforms [weapon systems].”

Glick dated the onset of the political instability in the Arab world to the overthrow of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. That was followed by a revolt by Syrian Kurds in 2004, the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon in 2005 and elections in Egypt and the Palestinian territories in 2006.

“Popular movements in the Arab world are largely Islamist and so no one wants to pay attention to it in the West. When the dam breaks, everything changes very quickly,” she said.