Obama Says Palestinian Stabbings Also ‘Contained’

“The increasing calm offers hope for Israelis and Palestinians to move past the recent violence and make an effort to restart negotiations.”

Washington, November 19 – A week after US President Barack Obama declared the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant “contained,” and two days before the organization’s deadly attacks in Paris, White House officials quietly confirmed that the president had similarly described the recent spate of Palestinian stabbing and shooting attacks on Israelis. This afternoon, A Palestinian from the Hebron area stabbed three people in Tel Aviv, killing two of them.

“The president was commenting on the decrease in violence over the last week or two,” said a White House official who spoke on condition of anonymity, a day before a Palestinian gunman killed an Israeli Rabbi and his son, and in apparent ignorance of ongoing Molotov cocktail and stoning attacks, as well as thwarted stabbing attacks. “The increasing calm offers hope for Israelis and Palestinians to move past the recent violence and make an effort to restart negotiations.”

The official noted the lack of fatalities or serious injuries among Israelis resulting from Palestinian attacks in the last two weeks, evidently under the erroneous presumption that if anything had happened, he’d be aware of it. “None of the major news networks have said anything about new attacks,” explained the official, unaware that numerous attacks have in fact taken place, and the only reason they have not been widely reported in Western media is that the latter tend to focus on fatal incidents, or non-fatal incidents in which Israel can be made to look brutal.

Experts say the contrast between Obama’s pronouncements and the actual, physical reality has often become apparent. “If you look at the way the president keeps backtracking on what he said he aimed to do to ISIS, this should come as little surprise,” said commentator Mitch N. Accompliszt. “There’s a constant negotiation of the gap – a chasm, really – between what he says and what actually happens. Sometimes he is able to anticipate the emerging reality, and walk back his rhetoric: ‘degrade and destroy ISIL’ becomes just ‘degrade,’ for example. But almost as often, events give the lie to the president’s assertions in what amounts to real time, and these moments are what results.”

Obama of course is not the first leader to have his pronouncements trumped by reality. A similar episode occurred before the Second World War when British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain agreed to let Nazi Germany annex parts of Czechoslovakia, accepting Hitler’s assurances that Germany sought no more territory than that, and even proclaiming upon his return to Britain that he had brought “peace for our time.”