Last week, while hosting Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas at the White House, President Obama called the blockade of Gaza “inherently unstable” and promised $400 million in foreign aid for “housing, school construction and business development.” Since Israel’s deadly raid on the humanitarian flotilla to Gaza last month, conservatives have been desperately trying to paint Obama as anti-Israel, and they predictably seized on the aid package.

In an interview Friday with Fox Business’ David Asman — who asked in a recent blog post, “Is the president funding terrorism?” — Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) claimed that the aid “rewarded” Hamas, and that it showed Obama was siding with Iran and Hamas over Israel:

BACHMANN: I also don’t think it was a a good signal for the president to give $400 million in aid to Gaza. He had a choice to make last week. The president had a choice between standing with Benjamin Netanyahu, or standing with Ahmadinejad and Hamas. Hamas is a terrorist organization. This should not have been a difficult choice, but the President chose to stand with Hamas and then they were rewarded this week with $400 million in aid. Gee, you don’t think that will embolden them to take future aggressive actions against Israel, do you? [...]

ASMAN: Are you going to start up some sort of congressional investigation to look into this, because it would literally be against the law to contribute money to an organization that funnels money to terrorists. [...]

BACHMANN: And again, I’m against sending this $400 million to Hamas. I think it’s a very foolish thing to do to reward them for these aggressive actions that were taken last week.

Watch it:

Just about every part of Bachmann’s argument, from the facts to the conclusions, is wrong. First of all, the $400 million Obama promised goes to Gaza and the West Bank, and the majority of it will almost certainly go to the larger West Bank. Secondly, none of the money will go to Hamas. The funds will instead be distributed through NGOs and the U.N., as has been U.S. policy in Gaza for some time.

Moreover, Bachmann’s claim that the aid package means Obama “chose” Hamas over Israel is complete nonsense. Beyond that fact that Obama has repeatedly stressed his support for Israel, U.S. aid to Israel easily dwarfs that to the Palestinian territories, and aid to Israel has actually increased under Obama. This fiscal year, the administration budgeted $2.7 billion for Israel, while it plans to give $2.85 billion in FY 2011.

Beyond this, Bachmann’s claim is based on the false suggestion that aid to Gaza is unprecedented. President Bush continued to fund humanitarian operations in Gaza, even after Hamas won an election and took control in 2006. As the New York Times noted soon after Obama took office, “By seeking to aid Gazans but not Hamas, the administration is following the lead of the Bush administration, which sent money to Gaza through nongovernmental organizations.” Under Bush, U.S. giving nearly doubled to the U.N. agency which provides services to Palestinian refugees in Gaza, the West Bank, and neighboring countries. The Bush administration increased aid to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees from $137 million in FY 2006, when Hamas took over, to $268 million in FY 2009, Bush’s last budget.

Bachmann doesn’t explain how aid for school construction in Gaza will help President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iran, but considering that she called Obama’s supposed appeasement of the country “worse than Neville Chamberlain” two days before the administration led the U.N. in passing the strictest sanctions yet on Iran, she probably can’t explain it.

This weekend, on Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace, California senatorial candidate Carly Fiorina indicated that she’s not very worried about the effect that her support of Arizona’s immigration law, SB-1070, will have on her relationship with Latino voters. Fiorina instead pointed out that she has received a “large number” of endorsements from the Latino community and that the Latinos she has talked to have suggested that the immigration debate boils down to “criminals crossing the border”:

WALLACE: On illegal immigration, you support the Arizona crackdown — the new law in Arizona. What do you say to those Latino voters — and that’s a big voting bloc in California who say this is going to lead to racial profiling?

FIORINA: I am very proud of the large number of Hispanic endorsements I’ve received. When I talk with member of the Latino community…what they say to me is, you know what, this is a question of criminals crossing the border. The truth is this: the federal government isn’t doing its job. It’s the federal goverment’s job to secure the border. The Obama administration has defunded securing the border. And while Barbara Boxer stands up and challenges the constitutionality of the Arizona law and villifies the people of Arizona, what she should be doing — what I’d be doing — is figuratively standing on the President’s desk and saying “Mr. President, the federal government needs to do its job and secure the border.”

Watch it:

However, now that the GOP primaries are over, Fiorina may want to take a closer look. While the nation as a whole is largely divided on SB-1070, Latino voters overwhelmingly oppose it. Polling by the Associated Press and Univision revealed that 66 percent of Latino voters think the Arizona law “goes too far in dealing with the issue of undocumented immigrants” and 73 percent think it should be a minor offense, rather than a serious criminal offense, to enter and remain in the United States without proper documentation. Meanwhile, 86 percent favor providing undocumented immigrants with a path to legalization. Fiorina has stated that “[i]t isn’t time to have that conversation” on legalizing immigrants through comprehensive immigration reform.

Fiorina has instead maintained that “You don’t need comprehensive immigration reform to secure the border.” Yet, contrary to what she suggested on Fox News Sunday, the Obama administration has actually spent more on immigration enforcement and border security than the previous administration. Spending for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) increased from fiscal year 2002, at almost $7.5 billion, to fiscal year 2010 over $17 billion. Even during a year of cutbacks, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that “DHS escaped the budgeting process unscathed” in 2011. In February, the Department of Homeland Security unveiled a $56.3 billion budget for 2011 for which immigration enforcement and securing the southwest border are two of the its main components. Given that crime statistics reveal that the border is already reportedly “safer now than it’s ever been,” Fiorina would probably “figuratively” look a little silly standing on President Obama’s desk screaming about it.

In terms of the “large number of Hispanic endorsements” that Fiorina boasts of, Wonk Room could only identify one Latino group on her website, Hispanic 100, and less than a handful of Latino local elected officials who have come out in support of her candidacy. Her opponent, Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA), has so far been endorsed by the United Farm Workers of America (UFW), the Mexican American Bar Association (MABA), and the Chicano Democratic Association (San Diego), along with several Latino officials on the local and state level.

On Saturday, the Washington Post editorial board echoed the sentiments of speech given by John McCain that called on Obama to essentially say meaner things to the Iranians. The Post’s editorial headline leadingly asked the question: “What if the Obama administration fully sided with Iran’s Green Movement?”

The least surprising thing about the Washington Post’s editorial was that it never answers its own question, because the answer is, well, clear: not much if anything would change, in fact there could be some seriously negative blowback.

While there has been legitimate criticism that the Obama administration should have over the last year spoken more forcefully for human rights in Iran, the basic problem with “fully embracing” the green movement is that doing so hurts the green movement. Following last year’s June 12th election the Iranian regime desperately sought to portray the green movement as a western-inspired plot, not an indigenous movement. Stating explicitly that it is US policy to support the green movement is handing a gift to the Iranian regime.

But even if that weren’t the case, what exactly are McCain and the Washington Post’s editorial page editor Fred Hiatt advocating? McCain talks about deploying “moral power” to undercut Iranian legitimacy domestically and in the region. McCain never says what he means by that and how that would differ from what the President has done with his Nowruz message, his statement on human rights abuses, and his speech to the Muslim world – all acts that conservatives on the right have derided. While “moral power” is a good rhetorical phrase, it would also be helpful if US moral authority wasn’t still being eroded in the Middle East by the fact that, among other things, that Guantanamo bay is still open.

The Washington Post got a little more specific, by suggesting the administration do some “internet firewall-busting.” Additionally, others have noted that the US should work to expand Iranians access to email and the internet and others note that some sanctions should be removed to allow Iranians greater access. These ideas may have some merit – but basing US foreign policy toward Iran on the assumption that President Obama can somehow will the green movement to topple an entrenched regime is silly.

Furthermore, McCain and Hiatt both say the President should mobilize like-minded countries against Iran. But isn’t this exactly what the administration has done by getting UN sanctions and by pushing the Europeans to take stronger action?

Instead, what McCain and Hiatt are advocating is the exact same failed bluster-based foreign policy that was pursued by the Bush administration, which enabled Iran to develop its nuclear program unimpeded.

Today on C-Span’s Washington Journal, Ryan Crocker, former U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, Kuwait, and Lebanon, noted that last week he told a congressional committee that “it makes sense” for the U.S. “to engage” Hezbollah because the group “is not just a proxy for foreign governments in Damascus and Tehran,” but also it is “a uniquely Lebanese entity”:

CROCKER: We talk to virtually everyone in Lebanon but we don’t talk to Hezbollah. And I think we are weakening our own hand by not talking to them. We don’t know very much about them because we don’t deal with them directly. […] By talking to them we would learn a lot more and we might see some advantages that currently we are blind to.

The former U.S. Ambassador cited his experience talking to insurgents in Iraq as a model for engaging similar groups. “We talked to anyone who would talk to us and we didn’t worry about labels and…the influence we were able to bring as a result of that engagement was a big help in winding down the Iraqi insurgency,” he said. The host then wondered if his thinking extended to the Taliban in Afghanistan:

HOST: So you’re ok with the idea of us talking to the Taliban for instance in Afghanistan?

CROCKER: I’m very much ok with it because again this doesn’t mean making concessions or conferring recognition or anything else any more than it did when we talked to insurgent elements in Iraq. You can’t really affect your adversary’s thinking and you can’t build up your own knowledge base about your adversary if you’re existing in total isolation to him.

Watch it:

The Washington Independent’s Spencer Ackerman reported last week that Crocker also said that fiery rhetoric toward U.S. adversaries has hurt American interests in Afghanistan, noting that President Bush’s “Axis of Evil” speech led the Iranians to release an anti-American insurgent leader from house arrest in Iran:

CROCKER: [I]t certainly changed the tone. And the key Iranian response to the “Axis of Evil” was to send Gulbuddin Hekmatyar back into Afghanistan. We had been talking to the Iranians up to that point about the possibility of Hekmatyar, who was under house arrest, being transferred to the Karzai government.

Because of the speech, Ackerman notes, “the Iranian leadership hedged its bets on cooperating with with the U.S. on post-Taliban Afghanistan and released a murderer back into the war zone.”

Yesterday on CNN’s Reliable Sources, in a conversation about the resignation of reporter Helen Thomas over her offensive comments about Israel, Atlantic journalist Jeffrey Goldberg denied host Howard Kurtz’s suggestion that there was a double-standard at work:

KURTZ: You know, some critics out there say — I’m sure you’ve heard this — that this shows the U.S. press is pro-Israel and you get in trouble when you criticize Israel. And if Helen Thomas had said the opposite thing about the Palestinians, she’d still have her job.

GOLDBERG: I don’t think that last point is necessarily true. If you gave this long diatribe about the Palestinians don’t exist, which is sort of the equivalent argument, I don’t think you’re going to last that long in the mainstream press.

Well, here’s former/future U.S. presidential candidate and Fox news commentator Mike Huckabee on how the Palestinians don’t exist:

PERSON 1: Some have talked about having a Palestinian state, but it doesn’t have to be in Israel. What do you think about that?

HUCKABEE: Basically, there really is no such thing — I need to be careful about saying this, because people will really get upset — there’s really no such thing as a Palestinian.

PERSON 1: Oh, that’s true.

PERSON 2: Finally, someone said it.

PERSON 1: Before 1948 it was all Arabs —

HUCKABEE: You have Arabs and Persians. And there’s such complexity in that. But there’s really no such thing [as a Palestinian]. That’s been a political tool to try and force land away from Israel.

Watch it:

Despite the fact that scholars such as Rashid Khalidi have established the emergence of a distinct Palestinian national consciousness in the 19th century, the offensive idea that the Palestinians don’t exist — or the equally offensive idea that they only exist as a negative reaction to the creation of Israel — is unfortunately still a fairly common belief among Israel hawks.

For example, the New Republic’s owner and editor-in-chief Marty Peretz writes stuff like this all the time:

“But let’s face it: the state of Palestine simply does not exist. There is even a question as to whether the Palestinian people really exists, except in the realm of conflicted ideology.” [5/1/07]

“Yes, Palestine is an utter fiction.” [5/15/07]

“There were no Palestinians until there were Israelis. And there will be no Palestine until Israel imposes it. Then it will be a nation-state like most of the other non-nation-states in the Middle East. Yes, a fraudulent nation-state.” [5/17/07]

“Let’s face facts. Only if you are ‘Eyeless in Gaza’ can you believe that these people are a ‘nation.’” [5/17/07]

“I think the conflict between the Arabs of Palestine and the Jewish state is of less import than the one between India and Pakistan, which like Palestine, is also not a country and the Pakistanis, also like the Palestinians, are not a nation.” [6/28/07]

“The Palestinians may not be the Palestinian nation. But they are who they are. It is not Washington that makes them fantasists.” [7/11/07]

And here’s Glenn Beck:

Around the turn of the century the Jews decided we need a homeland. What I’m looking for is a nice MLT, mutton, lettuce and tomato sandwich, and maybe, I don`t know, a homeland.

So they all started to begin gathering. The Zionists are coming to reclaim the homeland.

Palestinians, who aren’t really called Palestinians. They’re Syrians. They’re kind of wandering around, tending their flocks, walking around basically in the desert. Find themselves with a bunch of Jews there in the desert with them.

As Peter Beinart noted in his recent piece in the New York Review of Books, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself made the claim in his 1993 book A Place Among the Nations. Unlike Huckabee, however, Netanyahu has since learned not to say this when he’s near a microphone.

Condemning Thomas’ remarks last week, Goldberg wrote that they were “rooted in the same grotesque motivation” as Holocaust denial: “To deny to Jews the truth of their own history.” This is, of course, precisely what Huckabee and others mean to do to the Palestinians. I look forward to Goldberg similarly condemning Huckabee’s comments and calling for his resignation from Fox News.