President Barack Obama played golf instead of visiting Israel in his first three and a half years in office, former United Nations Ambassador John Bolton charged Sunday night on Aaron Klein’s WABC Radio show.
Chiding the president for recently playing his 100th round of golf since taking office, Bolton said, “Obama has been in office three and a half years and he has had time to do more fundraisers than any other first-term American president; has probably played more rounds of golf than any other president since Dwight Eisenhower. And yet he has not had time to fit into his busy schedule even one trip to Israel.”
Bolton, a long-time critic of Obama and supporter of Israel, added, “I think Gov. [Mitt] Romney is committed to the security of Israel in ways that are really very consistent with what used to be the broad, bipartisan tradition in American politics, a tradition that has not been followed by the Obama administration.” Romney is due to visit Israel next week.
Obama appeared in Jerusalem, including a visit to the Western Wall, during his 2008 campaign for president. Virtually all political observers have declared that a visit to Israel before the November elections is a “must” for the president, but another stop at the Western Wall will be tricky given his previous statements that the Old City of Jerusalem, which includes the Wall and Temple Mount, should not be under Israeli sovereignty.
Romney’s upcoming visit was an issue Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu tried to downplay during an interview with CBS’s “Face the Nation” Sunday.
The Prime Minister said he would not get involved in U.S. election politics and that he will say to Romney “pretty much the same thing I said to the presumptive Democratic candidate Sen. Barack Obama when I greeted him four years ago, roughly at the same time in the campaign.”
“I’ll tell him about Israel’s desire for peace and also about Israel’s concern with the arming of Iran with nuclear weapons, unfortunately it’s still with us four years later,” he added. “And also the threat to peace and the threat to Israel and to others by the growing arsenal of the terrorists with Iranian backers.”
