In the wake of the brutal repression of Iranian public dissent following the highly-contested elections there, United States President Barack Obama’s administration is feeling the heat from reporters over his continued soft-talk approach to the Persian Gulf power. According to an analysis in TIME magazine, this could all work out for the best as far as the Jews in Judea and Samaria are concerned.
Obama has sent senior representatives to talk to the media and explain the administration's position on Iran, as voices calling for a tougher American policy on the Middle Eastern theocracy get louder and clearer. Obama’s senior advisor David Axelrod went on ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopolous” and defended his boss’s stance on Iran Sunday, hinting that it was the best way to make Iran give up its nuclear weapons program.
Stephanopolous asked Axelrod if by sitting down with the Iranians, the United States would not be “crushing the hopes of the young people in Iran and across the region who listened hard to the President’s Cairo speech and thought he was striking out in a new direction.” The Obama
Major Garrett asked Obama – “you said about Iran that you were appalled and outraged. What took you so long to use those words?” 
advisor replied that while the President cared about those young people, he also had to address the danger of Iran’s nuclearization.
When Stephanopolous noted that “the crackdown [in Iran] appears to be working… and President Ahmadinejad is striking back at President Obama and the comments that President Obama made on Friday,” Axelrod tried to make light of Ahmadinejad’s statements, calling them “political theater.” Ahmadinejad did not set foreign policy or defense policy, he said, and was just trying to create a political diversion. He denied Ahmadinjad's claim that the U.S. had been meddling in Iran's affairs.
Asked if the invitation to Iran to engage in negotiations over nuclear policy was still open, Axelrod answered in the affirmative, but hastened to explain that “it's an invitation, it is not a reward."
Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, also defended Obama’s “outstretched hand” position to the media on Sunday, apparently using the same talking points as Axelrod. "This is a profound moment of change,” she said. “And what Ahmadinejad says to try to change the subject is, frankly, not going to work in the current context, because the people understand that the United States has not been meddling in their internal affairs.”
She, too, seemed to say that supporting the popular protest in Iran was less important than solving the nuclear issue through diplomacy. "The legitimacy of the government, while questioned by the people of Iran, is not the critical issue for the U.S. goal of preventing Iran from developing a nuclear capability," Rice said.
Testy news conference
Axelrod and Rice faced the media a few days after Obama had to fend off several similar questions.
In a news conference described as “testy” last Tuesday, FoxNews’s Major Garrett asked Obama – “you sa
Time Magazine carries an article headlined “Will Iran Take the Heat Off Israel over Settlements?”id about Iran that you were appalled and outraged. What took you so long to use those words?”
Obama insisted he has been consistent on Iran and fended off similar questions by two other senior reporters, who asked him if he was influenced by accusations that he was “timid and weak” on Iran, and wanted to know why he will not “spell out consequences” for Iran.
Good news for the Jews?
All this could be playing into the hands of Israel and Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, some think. The latest issue of Time Magazine carries an article headlined “Will Iran Take the Heat Off Israel over Settlements?”
“All along,” reporter Tony Karon writes, “Netanyahu has insisted that a different Middle East crisis, Iran's nuclear program, should be the focus of his relations with Washington. And though the Obama Administration resisted that argument, Netanyahu may now be getting help from an unexpected quarter: the Iranian regime, whose violent crackdown on peaceful protests against election-rigging have created a more pressing foreign-policy crisis for the Obama Administration.”
“Iran has now forced its way back to the top of the White House agenda,” Karon notes, “as a result of Tehran's violent crackdown on its own citizens protesting claims of election fraud. The domestic political pressure on the Administration to take a tougher stand against Iran's regime may actually help Netanyahu resist pressure for a settlement freeze. After all, the President may find it difficult, in Washington, to muster pressure on Israel over settlements at a moment when he's being berated for speaking too softly on Tehran's crackdown. Members of Congress are now proposing new sanctions, legislation and even demanding hearings on U.S. policy toward Tehran. And that's exactly the conversation that Netanyahu wants dominating the nation's capital.”