ROGER SIMON: Obama, the Shiite, Goes to Riyadh. “Much of this Iran-coddling began back when the Green Movement was in the streets of Tehran seeking the overthrow of the ayatollahs and chanting ‘Obama, Obama… Are you with us or are you with them?’ Our president did not respond. He was already in private communication with the bizarre Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Obama wanted to be the one who got credit for reining in the excesses of the Islamic Republic, not those unruly student demonstrators who were the ones suffering from the regime in the first place, being murdered, tortured and raped in Evin Prison, often in reverse order. . . . Now I realize Obama is not really a Shiite. He was raised in Sunni Indonesia. And, yes, Sunnis — notably ISIS, Boko Haram and AQAP — are leading the way in the public butchery department for the moment and need to be opposed with all our might. But that doesn’t mean Shiites are not active. Just the other day we had the mysterious Buenos Aires death of Alberto Nisman, who was about to reveal truths about the 1994 bombing of the Jewish community center in that city in which 85 were killed — a kind of simultaneous beheading in which Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and Hezbollah are said to be the culprits. Almost anyone honest and awake knows the Islamic Republic is and has been the primary state sponsor of terrorism worldwide for decades. . . . The president now has an Iran deal so tied up in his mind with his legacy that the appearance of Netanyahu in front of Congress opens a psychological wound so large Obama is likely to do almost anything. The world — not just Saudi Arabia and Israel — had better beware.”

ISRAELIS FIGURE OUT THAT APPEASING OBAMA HAS BEEN A WASTE OF TIME:

First, the unbridled attacks against Israel’s democratically elected – and popular – prime minister show us that when we are faced with an inherently hostile administration, the wages of appeasement are contempt.

No Israel leader has done more to appease a US administration than Netanyahu has done to appease Obama. Against the opposition of his party and the general public, Netanyahu in 2009 bowed to Obama’s demand to embrace the goal of establishing a Palestinian state.

Against the opposition of his party and the general public, in 2010 Netanyahu bowed to Obama’s demand and enacted an official 10-month moratorium on Jewish property rights in lands beyond the 1949 armistice lines, and later enacted an unofficial moratorium on those rights.

And Netanyahu bowed to Obama’s pressure, released murderers from prison and conducted negotiations with Abbas that only empowered Abbas and his political war to delegitimize and isolate Israel.

And for all his efforts to appease Obama, today the administration abets Palestinian terrorism and political warfare.

Appeasement never works.

DAVID BERNSTEIN EXPLAINS OBAMA’S “CHICKENSHIT” PROBLEMS. “The Obama Administration came in to office thinking it could either force Netanyahu to make concessions, or force his government to fall. . . . Instead, Netanyahu has managed to stay his own course, and still is in no danger of losing his parliamentary majority. Hence administration frustration and ‘chickenshit.'”

ANN ALTHOUSE ON JOSH MARSHALL ON OBAMA AND ISRAEL: “Marshall won’t say it directly, but this feels like desperation about the 2014 elections.”

Plus, from the comments: “The other day we read that with the defeat of Eric Cantor, American Jews don’t have a Republican they can go to. Today we are told the Republicans are working for the Israelis. Anyway, it’s all absurd. After all, the Israelis have no better friend than John Kerry; what do they need Republicans for?”

And: From “Smart Diplomacy” to “Smarm Diplomacy.”

THIS TIME, it’s Biblical.

UPDATE: Heh. Netanyahu calls for immediate U.S.-Al Qaeda ceasefire.

Here’s a transcript of Netanyahu’s remarks yesterday: “As I’ve said many times, the United States has a right to defend itself against terrorist attacks from Al Qaeda. And as a result of its war in Afghanistan, and drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen, the United States has already done significant damage to Al Qaeda’s infrastructure. I’ve also said, however, that we have serious concerns about the rising number civilian deaths from drone strikes and the potential loss of American lives from terrorism. And that is why it now has to be our focus and the focus of the international community to bring about a cease-fire that ends the fighting and that can stop the deaths of innocent civilians.”

Perhaps he’ll ban flights here.

ANOTHER UPDATE: From the comments: “I hear that seven Hamas terrorists were killed yesterday by an IDF soldier armed only with a replica of Obama’s jawbone.”

WEAK HORSE: Hunt for Obama’s Middle East Policy Comes Up Empty, Jeffrey Goldberg writes at Bloomberg News:

Yet all we have from Obama is passivity, which is a recurring theme in the administration’s approach to the Middle East. So is “aggressive hedging,” a term used by the Brookings Institution’s Shadi Hamid to describe Obama’s strange reluctance to clearly choose sides in the uprisings of the Arab Spring.

“There’s a widespread perception in the region that Obama is a weak, somewhat feckless president,” Hamid, who runs the Brookings Doha Center, told me. “Bush may have been hated, but he was also feared, and what we’ve learned in the Middle East is that fear, sometimes at least, can be a good thing. Obama’s aggressive hedging has alienated both sides of the Arab divide. Autocrats, particularly in the Gulf, think Obama naively supports Arab revolutionaries, while Arab protesters and revolutionaries seem to think the opposite.”

Leaders across the Middle East don’t take Obama’s threats seriously. Neither Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu nor the Arab leaders of the Gulf countries believe he’ll act militarily against Iran’s nuclear program in his second term.

RELATED: Obama waives sanctions on countries that use child soldiers:

“When a little boy is kidnapped, turned into a child soldier, forced to kill or be killed — that’s slavery,” Obama said in a speech at the Clinton Global Initiative. “It is barbaric, and it is evil, and it has no place in a civilized world. Now, as a nation, we’ve long rejected such cruelty.”

But for the third year in a row, Obama has waived almost all U.S. sanctions that would punish certain countries that use child soldiers, upsetting many in the human rights community.

And finally, Obama: ‘protecting’ American lady-parts. Egyptian ones? …Well, not so much.

None of which should seem very “unexpectedly” at this point — even to Bloomberg.

SPRINGTIME FOR THE ASSOCIATED PRESS: “Of the hundreds of professional photos taken”at Netanyahu’s speech to the UN, “the AP and Reuters decided to push these onto the wire.”

RELATED: “Obama WILL speak to Netanyahu but only on the phone and a day AFTER Hillary Clinton meets him in New York,” according to the London Daily Mail.

How far we’ve traveled in the last four years…

ROGER SIMON: Mr. Netanyahu’s Dilemma. “Who would want to be Benjamin Netanyahu? As the prime minister of Israel he has a dreadful calculus to make: Is Barack Obama sufficiently serious about preventing Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons?”

HOT MIC ALERT: Obama to Medvedev: I’ll totally cave on missile defense in my second term if Putin will give me “space.” “Obama won’t share these plans with the American people. However, he’ll share them with the Russians, and ask for their help in influencing the election. . . . What other nations has Obama asked for ‘space’ on American foreign and national-security policy so that he can win a second term? And what American interests is Obama willing to trade for that ‘space’?”

Related: President Hot Mic can’t wait for a second term (Update: The bigger question): “Notice how the Obama captured when he doesn’t think he is being recorded is so differenct from campaign Obama. The ‘bitter clinger’ remarks and the Netanyahu put-down are the most memorable. And there are the hot mic sound bites which the media won’t release, like CBS refusing to release the full audio of Obama’s comments about Paul Ryan, and the LA Times holding back the Khalidi tape. The most recent hot mic is in many ways the most important, because it demonstrates once again that unrestrained by the need for reelection, Obama is going to go to town.”

ANOTHER WHITE HOUSE STAFF SCREWUP: Obama Honors South Korean President With Japanese Food. “What’s next? German beer for when Netanyahu visits? Does the President of the U.S. not know the history of Japanese atrocities in WWII? Koreans in all 57 states would like an explanation.”

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: Report From The Middle East: Part One. “President Obama fell into a trap when he made a settlement freeze a precondition for talks. Secretly, both Israelis and Palestinian leaders are, I think, delighted that the US is now so tangled up in this demand that it has lost most of its influence over negotiations. The Palestinians are happier than the Israelis; it looks to world opinion as if it is Israeli intransigence on the settlement issue that is the chief obstacle to peace. But the Israeli government — while angry at Obama for making them look even worse than usual to much of the world — is also relieved that the settlement demand is so unpopular in Israel that Prime Minister Netanyahu pays no domestic political price for rejecting it.”

RON RADOSH: Obama’s Speech To AIPAC: An Assessment. “So the question is, as I conclude, whether or not the President means it, whether or not he will backpedal in the other direction, and whether he will seek to mend matters with Prime Minister Netanyahu, rather than push him in directions Israel does not want to go. We now have evidence that in a few short days, the pressure moved the President away from the contentious trap he set before meeting PM Netanyahu.”

NOT-SO-SMART DIPLOMACY: “The larger problem is Obama’s failure to distinguish properly between friends and enemies.” On the other hand, he has no such problem in the domestic political context.

Related: Netanyahu Urges U.S. Return to 1845 Borders.

UPDATE: Basil Copeland writes on the 1845 borders: “Hey, don’t be giving Obama any ideas. He’s got a voting constituency in the Southwest who’d like to see a return to those borders.”

MORE: A reader emails: “Why would Obama cede all those voters in the Southwest to Mexico? They’re only useful to him in this country.”

MORE STILL: An I-told-you-so.

RICHARD COHEN ON OBAMA’S GROWING UNPOPULARITY: “What has come to be called the Obama Paradox is not a paradox at all. Voters lack faith in him making the right economic decisions because, as far as they’re concerned, he hasn’t. He went for health-care reform, not jobs. He supported the public option, then he didn’t. He’s been cold to Israel’s Binyamin Netanyahu and then all over him like a cheap suit. Americans know Obama is smart. But we still don’t know him. Before Americans can give him credit for what he’s done, they have to know who he is. We’re waiting.”

Well, maybe if the press hadn’t been colluding to keep us from finding out, we’d know. . . .

DAVID HORNIK: Political Correctness Rules at Obama-Bibi Presser. “This ‘kiss and make up’ meeting accomplished what both leaders wanted: Obama shored up his pro-Israel credentials before the November elections and Netanyahu got Obama to play it his way on Israeli nukes.”

MARK STEYN: Parochially post-American: Don’t Blame Obama. “It’s not just the president. The entire administration suffers, to put it at its mildest, from systemic indifference to American allies. It wasn’t Obama but a mere aide who sneered to Fleet Street reporters that Britain was merely one of 200 countries in the world and shouldn’t expect any better treatment than any of the others. It wasn’t Obama but the State Department that leaked Hillary Clinton’s dressing down of Prime Minister Netanyahu. Ally-belittling comes so reflexively to this administration that it’s now doing drive-by bird-flipping.”

OBAMA ON the Iranian elections: “When I got to the language quoted above, especially when Obama seems to have confidence that the Iranian government is really looking into irregularities, and points out our lack of international observers, I swear I thought Jim was going to reveal at the end that this was an exceedingly clever parody of President Obama. Sadly, no. The special irony is the widespread reports that the Obama Administration would like to bring down Netanyahu’s government in Israel. I suppose we can’t expect Obama to say ‘that we in the United States do not want to make any decisions for the [Israelis], but we do believe that the [Israeli] people and their voices should be heard and respected.'”