Former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton endorsed Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh as “preferable to anarchy” in a Fox News appearance this morning. Bolton argued that Saleh — despite clinging to power for three decades, refusing to implement democratic reforms and overseeing a violent crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators — is the key to preventing Al-Qaeda from sweeping from across Yemen. He said:

I think Saleh’s return is quite significant. For month’s people had been saying the Saudis were trying to talk him out of power — him and his family — and when he was wounded in that attempted assasination and had to go to Saudi Arabia for treatment, I think many people thought that was the easy way out, in effect, and he would never go back. And he obviously didn’t leave Saudi Arabia without their concurrence. So my guess is the Saudis have put more weight on stability in Yemen than perhaps we’re willing to. But in light of the killing of Awlaki, I think we have to look again at whether Saleh might not be preferable to anarchy, certaintly preferable to Al-Qaeda.

Watch it:

But Bolton’s apparent endorsement of Saleh’s iron-fisted rule as means to containing Al Qaeda isn’t backed up by the reported facts on the ground. Indeed, Saleh cooperated with U.S. efforts to pressure al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) but AQAP appears to have suffered a major setback with the death of Anwar al-Awlaki. The main coalition of opposition groups in Yemen have shown little sympathy for AQAP and claim that Saleh used al Qaeda’s presence as an excuse for harsh tactics against pro-democracy activists and his political opponents.

Last year, Senate Republicans blocked career diplomat Robert Ford’s confirmation to become the next U.S. ambassador to Syria because they thought sending a top envoy to Damascus would be a “reward” to President Bashar al-Assad for bad behavior. A number of Ford’s detractors have since changed their minds — including some senators who opposed Ford’s confirmation and the neoconservative Foreign Policy Initiative — and are now calling on the Senate to confirm Ford, whose recess appointment expires at the end of the year.

But has Ford’s presence in Syria, particularly since the pro-democracy movement began, been particularly rewarding for Assad and his regime? Yesterday, a pro-government group tried to attack Ford and his American delegation as they traveled to a meeting with an opposition leader. A State Department spokesperson said, “The mob was violent” and “seriously” damaged the delegation’s vehicles.

Indeed, the incident indicates the level at which Ford has become a thorn in the Assad regime’s side. He has defied travel bans to meet with opposition leaders throughout Syria, made unannounced trips to Syrian cities that have been hotbeds of unrest, and even attended the funeral of a “high-profile” Syrian human rights activist who died in custody (see video of Ford’s appearance here. Syrian security forces attacked the funeral shortly after the ambassador departed). Ford regularly takes his on-the-ground experiences in Syria to Facebook where he lashes out at the regime for its violent crackdown on protesters (he wrote today about yesterday’s attack).

Referring to Ford as America’s “am-badass-ador” in Syria last night on MSNBC, host Rachel Maddow wondered what the Senate Republicans are waiting for:

MADDOW: After all this guy’s been through, after all this guy has done, after everything he’s doing in Syria — Republicans in the United States Senate have not been able to bring themselves to allow him to be confirmed. Seriously? No, really? Seriously? Come on!

Watch the clip:

But apparently, some Senate Republicans still find Ford’s activity in Syria rewarding to Assad. An aide to Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK), the senator who placed the hold on Ford’s confirmation last year, said that he still “continues to stand by the concerns” he had then about sending an ambassador to Damascus. Coburn’s office has ignored repeated inquiries into whether he plans to again place a hold on Ford given that his confirmation now has widespread conservative support. “You could potentially anticipate a number of senators putting holds on Ford,” a GOP Senate aide said earlier this month.

Ford himself urged the Senate to confirm. “Lower level diplomats are great, but they don’t carry the weight, they don’t carry the prestige of the president’s personal representative,” he said last week. “I think we owe it to [Syrians] to remain supportive and it try to build that support wisely, carefully but to build that support,” Ford said in his Senate hearing last month.

With deteriorating relations between Turkey and Israel, some of Israel’s staunchest backers in the U.S. have seized on the diplomatic crisis to push for the U.S. to abandon its partnership with Turkey — including kicking the strategically-located Eurasian country out of the NATO alliance. The campaign, spearheaded by neoconservatives, ramped up this week with attacks demonizing Turkey from several Islamophobic commentators. Over the past few weeks, these Islamophobes have been accusing Turkey of trying to create an Islamist empire, one that would put Turkey at odds with the West and make it an enemy of the U.S.

On Tuesday, Daniel Pipes of the Middle East Forum wrote that he “see(s) a rogue Turkey as the region’s greatest threat”:

A second republic headed by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his Islamist colleagues of the AK Party (AKP) began that day. The military safely under their control, AKP ideologues now enjoy can pursue their ambitions to create an Islamic order.

Investigative Project chief Steven Emerson wrote yesterday:

The struggle against Israel is one facet of the Muslim nation’s new Islamist foreign policy under the leadership of Erdoğan and his AKP party. Turkey has distanced itself from membership in the European Union, a former goal of the nation, in order to pursue better ties with terror-supporting nations like Syria and Iran.

Also Thursday, Atlas Shrugs blogger Pam Geller wrote:

Turkey has reverted (no pun intended), and dreams Ottoman domination and Islamic imperialism.

On Robert Spencer’s Jihad Watch blog, Joseph Zaalishvili wrote Wednesday:

After Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan openly began the Islamization of Turkey, the jihadists found fertile ground there. Turkey appeared ambitious to become the leader of Islam in the region.

Earlier this month, Center for Security Policy (CSP) head Frank Gaffney wrote about the “increasingly overtly hostile posture towards Israel being taken by Turkey under its Islamist prime minister, Recep Erdogan.” His colleague at CSP, Caroline Glick, wrote in the Jerusalem Post:

[W]e need to recognize that what we are experiencing now is the beginning, not the end, of Turkey’s slide into the enemy camp. Erdogan is openly taking steps to transform Turkey into an Islamic state along the lines of Iran.

Erdoğan is not actually an Islamist, as demonstrated by his call last week for Egypt to become a secular state, drawing warnings from Egypt’s actual Islamists, the Muslim Brotherhood, for Erdoğan to butt out.

And while Turkey has indeed tried to end regional strife and avoid conflagration through diplomacy, its partnership with the U.S. and NATO are clearly valuable to Erdoğan’s government. Just this month, Turkey agreed to host a NATO radar system, part of a missile defense system designed to guard against Iranian weapons advances (the move drew criticism from Iran).

That this network of Islamophobes are all taking the same line should come as no surprise. As detailed in CAP’s “Fear, Inc.” report about America’s Islamophobia industry, they come from a small cadre of so-called “experts” and “scholars” who form organizations that fuel Islamophobia in the U.S.

Moments ago, speaking at the retirement ceremony for Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen, President Obama said American-born radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki took the lead in “planning efforts to murder innocent Americans” as head of external operations for al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Obama said it was a “major blow” to al Qaeda.

Former Bush U.N. Ambassador John Bolton, however, tried his hardest to downplay the significance of the Obama administration’s killing of Al-Awlaki in Yemen today, telling Fox News that we shouldn’t “read more into it than there is”:

BOLTON: At the same time, I think it’s important as individual Al Qaeda figures and other terrorists are killed that we not read more into it than there is. Consider this analogy if you were around in the 1920s and somebody said, my God, Vladimir Lenin is dead. The Bolsheviks will never recover from this. [...]

So while Al-Awlaki death is significant, I would not read cosmic consequences into it.

Watch it:

Bolton’s analogy is rather flawed, as Lenin died of natural causes after a period of of semi-retirement from politics, while Al-Awlaki was at the height of his power. Al-Awlaki had a hand in almost all of the high-profile terror attempts in recent years — he helped recruit Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the “underwear bomber,” exchanged emails with Fort Hood shooter Maj. Nidal Hasan, communicated with failed Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad, and directed the attempted bombing of cargo planes last year.

But as NBC News’ First Read noted this morning, “no president” in over 20 years “has had more foreign-policy successes happen under his watch than President Obama.” Yet, he’s “getting almost no credit from the American public.” Despite the killing of Osama Bin Laden and nearly two dozen other top terrorist, the dismantling of Al Qaeda, and the ouster of Muammar Gaddafi polls show the public still gives Republicans the edge on combating terrorism. That after President Bush failed to capture Bin Laden or even pursue him with much alacrity.

This is likely because conservative media personalities and Republican lawmakers consistently mislead the public on Obama’s foreign policy, suggesting he is weak on terror and maligning his stance as “leading from behind.” There has never been any basis in reality to their attacks, and even less so after the killing of Al-Awlaki. But Bolton’s performance on Fox this morning suggests that even this latest incident won’t make conservatives acknowledge reality.

This week, the FBI arrested and charged 26-year-old suspected terrorist Rezwan Ferdaus with plotting to use remote-controlled planes filled with plastic explosives to attack the Pentagon and the U.S. Capitol. The Massachusetts man began plotting a “violent jihad” against the U.S. early last year “with the goal of terrorizing the United States, decapitating its ‘military center’ and killing as many ‘kafirs,’ i.e., an Arabic term meaning non-believers, as possible.”

Not only did Ferdaus’ radical views tip off the FBI, they got him expelled from his local mosque in Roxbury, Massachusetts. Last year, the Islamic Sosciety of Boston Cultural Center asked Ferdaus to leave because of his radical Islamic views, hostility towards women, and his suspected support of al Qaeda. “I can’t think of a mosque where he was welcome,” said the mosque’s director:

Rezwan Ferdaus was said to revere the terrorist organization [al Qaeda], and he criticized the mosque’s participation in interfaith efforts and in politics. He also disapproved of the mosque’s liberal policies that allowed men and women to eat and drink together in its cafe and was hostile toward women he thought dressed inappropriately or who had conversations with men, the official said.

“We said, ‘Look, that’s not going to work here,’ ’’ said Atif Harden, director of institutional advancement at the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center. “I can’t think of a mosque where he was welcome. He was clearly way out of step with the rest of the Muslim community . . . very disaffected, very disturbed. Just a bitter, angry guy.’’

Another mosque attendee Ricardo Maestre noted that Ferdaus “would really be disrespectful to the sisters who go here and say really stupid things, talk about jihad.” Noting the importance for Muslims to speak against extremism in Islam, Maestre added, “Some Muslims are afraid to speak out against that…I’m not.”

Mosques and Muslim communities have been instrumental in the fight against homegrown terrorism. As Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) has noted, “About a third of all foiled al-Qaida related plots in the U.S. relied on support or information provided by members of the Muslim community. Indeed, the father of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab — the man who tried to bomb a plane over Detroit last year — actually alerted authorities about his son’s “extreme radical views” months before the attempted attack.

What’s more, a Duke University study found that “many mosque leaders had put significant effort into countering extremism by building youth programs, sponsoring antiviolence forums and scrutinizing teachers and texts.” “This is one reason that Muslim-American terrorism has resulting in fewer than three dozen of the 136,000 murders committed in the United States since 9/11,” the study concluded.

In the era of extreme Islamophobia, the role of Muslim Americans in fighting terrorism often get papered over, ignored, or completely reversed to fit a political agenda. Despite the consistent distortion and hatred directed at Muslim Americans, they continue to play a fundamental part in our national security.

Former Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-CO) blasted Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) for failing to take a hard-line against Muslims or embrace the Islamophobia currently sweeping across the GOP.

Tancredo, who has suggested that bombing the Muslim holy cities of Mecca and Medina would serve as a good “deterrent” against Islamic terrorism, opines in the Daily Caller:

What is not yet as widely known about Perry is that he extends his taxpayer-funded compassion not only to illegal aliens but also to Muslim groups seeking to whitewash the violent history of that religion. Perry endorsed and facilitated the adoption in Texas public schools of a pro-Muslim curriculum unit developed by Muslim clerics in Pakistan.

Tancredo cites “Islam scholar” Robert Spencer — Spencer plays the role of a “misinformation expert” in the Islamophobia network examined in the Center for American Progress’ new report Fear, Inc. — who examined the program and concluded:

The curriculum is a complete whitewash and it’s got the endorsement of Perry. It’s not going to give you any idea why people are waging jihad against the West — it’s only going to make you think that the real problem is ‘Islamophobia.’

Indeed Perry did develop a relationship with Pakistani religious leader and philanthropist Aga Khan and helped facilitate a 2009 agreement between Texas and Aga Khan organizations in the “fields of education, health sciences, natural disaster preparedness and recovery, culture and the environment.” At the signing ceremony, Perry said:

[T]raditional Western education speaks little of the influence of Muslim scientists, scholars, throughout history, and for that matter the cultural treasures that stand today in testament to their wisdom.

Not all conservative pundits have bought into the anti-Muslim hysteria. The Center for Security Policy’s David Reaboi and conservative blogger Ace of Spades have written lengthy rebuttals and characterized the attacks on Perry and his Aga Khan connections as inaccurate. But Perry’s involvement in the development of curriculum to teach Texas high school students about Islam has served as a rallying cry for anti-Muslim advocates who see the curriculum as a threat to their portrayal of Islam as an inherently violent religion.

Tancredo concludes his anti-Muslim editorial by suggesting that Perry’s affiliation with Grover Norquist, a Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) board member and president of Americans for Tax Reform, is yet another sign of “Perry’s Muslim blind spot.” Tancredo asks:

Why does [Perry] think he can claim to be the “tea party candidate” while endorsing a whitewash of Islamic extremism in Texas schools?

Tancredo’s reliance on discredited “scholars” like Robert Spencer and his assertions that radical Islam, via Grover Norquist and Aga Khan, have coopted Perry into spreading a “pro-Muslim curriculum unit” in Texas public schools offers an insight into the hateful and paranoid mindsets of those who embrace an anti-Muslim political agenda. (HT: Little Green Footballs)

Our guest blogger is Martin Wolberg-Stok, sustainable security intern at the Center for American Progress.

The Department of Defense notified Congress on September 14 of its plans to sell the government of Bahrain a package of arms worth $53 million, touting the island nation as “an important force for political stability and economic progress in the Middle East.” This disturbing news comes as the Bahraini government continues to crack down on protests that began in February of this year. In March, then-Secretary of Defense Robert Gates visited Bahrain and met with the country’s king and crown prince, telling them that “citizens’ desire for governmental change and reform across the region was real and irreversible” and urging them to engage in dialogue with the Bahraini people.

Speaking last week before the United Nations General Assembly, President Obama declared that the United States “will always stand up” for “universal rights.” Indeed, the President had strong words to say about Syria’s crackdown on peaceful protesters, urging the United Nations Security Council to “stand with the Syrian people” and sanction the Syrian regime.

But President Obama’s words were far tamer when it came to Bahrain, a country that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, has called a “critical ally.” The United States Navy has used Bahraini ports since 1947 and the island now serves as the headquarters for the U.S. Naval Forces Central Command and the Fifth Fleet, which together are responsible for an area that stretches from the Persian Gulf to the Horn of Africa. In his speech at the United Nations, Obama praised the steps Bahrain has taken toward reform, though he warned that “more is required” and that our “close friend” should “pursue a meaningful dialogue that brings peaceful change that is responsive to the people.” Despite multiple claims of torture of pro-reform activists at the hands of Bahraini security forces, the President made no mention of Bahraini human rights abuses in his speech. This stood in stark contrast his strongly worded comments about the Syrian regime.

In response to the administration’s hypocrisy in the face of Bahraini human rights abuses, the Project on Middle East Democracy has drafted a letter to Congress, signed by a group of organizations including Human Rights Watch and Freedom House, urging members of the House and Senate to block the arms sale to Bahrain. According to the New York Times and various human rights groups, more than 30 people have died and scores more have been injured since the protests began in February. Thousands more have been arrested or fired from their jobs. The ironic decision to sell defense equipment to Bahrain comes at a time when the Obama administration is increasingly promoting the importance of preventive diplomacy and conflict prevention. The Pentagon’s press release claims the sale will “contribute to the foreign policy and national security of the United States by helping to improve the security of a major non-NATO ally,” but at what impact to America’s credibility in the region?

This week on Fox News, anchors Bill O’Reilly and John Stossel discussed former Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean’s advocacy for the Mujahedeen-e Khalq (MEK), an exiled Iranian opposition group designated as a “foreign terror organization” by the State Department. The leadership of the group is based in Paris, while more than 3,000 former fighters linger in Camp Ashraf — a base set up outside Baghdad in the 1980s when the group allied with Saddam Hussein against Iran — where they face violent harassment by the Iraqi authorities.

O’Reilly and Stossel went through some background about the group and Dean’s history of paid speeches advocating for their removal from the terror rolls and U.S. recognition of the group’s leader, Maryam Rajavi, as the president of Iran.

Their history is shoddy. For example, Stossel blames the group’s U.S. designation solely on acts committed in the 1970s, which he says were carried out by a “nasty fringe” and occurred “30, 40 years ago.” But the MEK only renounced violence in 2001 and fighters were separated from their tanks in Camp Ashraf only in 2003. The U.S. government actually directly accuses the MEK of carrying out terrorist acts as recently as the late 1990s.

But the really staggering ignorance on the part of Stossel is his misunderstanding of the statutes that criminalize material support for groups designated as terrorists. Stossel compares Dean’s paid speeches advocating for the MEK to speeches on behalf of medical industry groups and Stossel’s own paid speeches. O’Reilly, to his credit, pushes back:

O’REILLY: He’s lobbying, and he’s getting paid by this group, Dean, to…

STOSSEL: We don’t know that he’s lobbying for them. He’s made speeches for them, but so has Rudy Giuliani.

O’REILLY: Come on. Why would these guys do that unless they were getting paid?

STOSSEL: Because they say, “Oh, we have Howard Dean speaking here in Belgium. Come over and meet Howard Dean.”

O’REILLY: That’s right. And Dean wouldn’t do that unless they were greasing him.

STOSSEL: Right. They’re greasing him.

O’REILLY: Yes, so he’s getting money from these people.

STOSSEL: So? I make speeches for money.

O’REILLY: Yes.

STOSSEL: If he checked them out and he believes…

O’REILLY: You do the chamber of commerce in Toledo. Not the Muhajadeen.

STOSSEL: If I believed in their cause, as he says he does.

O’REILLY: Oh, yes, he believes in their cause. Socialized medicine people? That’s what he believes in.

STOSSEL: He’s also taken money to change the patent rules for pharmaceutical companies. I don’t blame him for doing that.

O’REILLY: Dean is a lobbyist now, that’s what he does. And he gets paid by MSNBC.

Watch the whole exchange:

Stossel’s defense closely mirrors that of Rudy Giuliani, Tom Ridge, and Fran Townsend (a paid CNN contributor), who argued after they were accused of material support for terrorism that they didn’t consider the MEK to be a terror group.

That Dean was paid by the group — or more accurately, American supporters of the group (if that’s indeed the case) — is less important than whether or not he made what is considered speech that was “coordinated” with the group. Having spoken to actual MEK rallies in Europe alongside Rajavi, that is a difficult defense for Dean and other paid or unpaid advocates to make. (This is not to say one shouldn’t be able to speak in favor of delisting the MEK, or that they do not deserve today to be delisted, but simply that until they are delisted, the laws on the matter are clear.)

But one does not simply get to choose which laws they follow and which designations they recognize. In a nation where the rule of law matters, it needs to be applied equally to all violators, irrespective of what they or others feel about it. That’s why the false comparison between the MEK and the Toledo Chamber of Commerce is so staggering.

As ThinkProgress documented, the congregants of the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro in Murfreesboro, Tennessee had been working for more than a year to gain approval for an expansion of the mosque and the building of an Islamic Center. While making their case for an expansion, these peaceful Muslims faced a vicious campaign of hate from far-right political activists in the state, which included Islamophobic accusations that they were trying to establish Sharia law in Tennessee, comments by the state’s lieutenant governor that Islam was a “cult,” and an arson attack.

Yet the mosque’s attendees overcame these trials, and the far-right political activists failed to convince Tennesseans, among whom only 28 percent objected to the expansion, according to polling conducted last October. Yesterday, the Murfreesboro Islamic Center finally broke ground on its mosque expansion, to the cheers of hundreds who came to celebrate, and without any controversy or threats. “We are not really celebrating the groundbreaking of this center. We are celebrating that liberty and freedom and religion exists as a fact in this nation,” said Ossama Bahloul, the mosque’s imam. “And we can be here in America and set an example for people.” Watch The Tennessean’s video report from the groundbreaking ceremony:

Given the past threats, the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro does plan to take security measures at their new expansion, including the installation of 24-hour video surveillance cameras.

Two Swedish men arrested for the attempted murder of two South Asian men reportedly gained inspiration for their attacks from Norwegian terrorist Anders Behring Brevik.

The Local — a Swedish English language news website — reports that four days after Breivik’s attacks in Oslo and Utøya, a South Asian man sleeping on a bench in Västerås, a city in central Sweden, was attacked and seriously injured. In a second attack, two days later, a Sri Lankan man was stabbed while delivering newspapers.

Police reports obtained by the Dagens Nyheter daily and translated by the Local, say that one of the defendants sent the other attacker the following text message shortly after Breivik’s massacre on July 22:

A Norwegian ‘Nazi’ has killed like, around 84! From the left who, like, cheered on Islam. HAHAHA!! WHITE POWER!

The accused attacker reportedly screamed “Go home” and drew a swastika on the Sri Lankan man’s bag after stabbing him.

While the two suspects may have been motivated by a broader white supremacist ideology, Breivik appears to have served as an inspiration for them in their decision to attack South Asians. The text message indicates that they shared the same anger with left wing politics, and its supposed embrace of Muslim immigrants.

Both Sweden and Norway have growing white supremacist movements, but U.S. Islamophobes and European white supremacists appear to have found common ground in stoking fears about Muslim immigration into Europe. Indeed, Anders Breivik cited U.S. “counterjihad” bloggers, such as Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller, numerous times in his manifesto.

While European white supremacists have been implicated in hate crimes against numerous ethnic and religious minorities, the growing uptick in European Islamophobia is shedding new light on the overlapping ideologies of anti-Muslim advocates and white supremacists.

For more information on Breivik and his manifesto’s references to American Islamophobes, see the Guardian’s visualization of his citations and the Center for American Progress’ new report, Fear Inc.

Yesterday on his radio show, right-wing host Jordan Sekulow asked Mitt Romney how he would have handled the Palestinian bid for United Nations statehood recognition if he was president. Romney of course immediately jumped into to the standard, tired, old hat right-wing Obama-hates-Israel talking points but then he said something rather peculiar. Romney said the United States should reconsider its relationships with countries that vote in support of the Palestinian bid:

ROMNEY: Putting aside what’s already happened, at this stage the president should make it very clear that we stand with Israel, that this is very important to the United States of America and that any nation that votes against Israel and against the United States in the vote in the United Nations will recognize that America will very carefully reconsider our relationship with that nation.

I think that people who vote against us in significant ways have to understand that there are consequenses of that and we will see them in a different light and our support for the Palestinian people will be adjusted if they continue to pursue this desire to have a separate vote and to be established as having a quasi-state status within the U.N. This is something which will end our support in foreign aid to the Palestinian effort. It will at the same time reshape our policy with regards to nations that oppose us. People have to recognize that we’re nice but we’re not crazy. And when people oppose us, we’re not going to reward them for doing so.

So which countries would a President Romney “reconsider” America’s relationship with? As it stands right now, the Palestinian U.N. bid will be up for a vote in the 13-member Security Council (of which the United States, along with France, the U.K., China and Russia are permanent members with veto power). China, Russia, India, Brazil and South Africa have all said they would support the bid. France and the U.K. haven’t said either way, but the New York Times reported this month that they “might vote in favor.”

If the Palestinian bid goes to the General Assembly, which could elevate the Palestinian Authority’s status from nonvoting “observer entity” to “observer state,” the number of countries that the U.S. would have to reevaluate its relationship with, under a President Romney, would grow significantly. For example, the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), the 118-member U.N. bloc, announced that it supported the Palestinian U.N. membership move (although it is not certain if all member states would vote in favor). Members of the NAM include most African countries — including Egypt — Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Pakistan, Chile, and Peru.

So how exactly would Romney “reconsider” relationships with these countries — many of them close American allies — for supporting the Palestinians? The former Massachusetts governor didn’t expound on that point. But perhaps these nations would like to know what their punishment will be if Romney moves in to the White House in 2013.