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By Ira Sharkansky
 JERUSALEM—Barack Obama sounded like he was campaigning for President of the World in his recent speeches at the United Nations. He displayed the same confident body language, and the same ringing phrases that helped him capture the American presidency. If the United Nations set up an office and election in response to his performances in New York, he might do even better than in his campaign against a war hero and what's her name.
The first snippet of his speech to the General Assembly that came into our living room may have been chosen by a left-wing Israeli media manager looking for an ally. "We continue to emphasize that America does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements."
I gulped, look at my wife of the illegal curtains, and began to ponder the places where we could spend the rest of our lives.
The Obama White House considers our French Hill neighborhood to be Palestinian. The Arab family living in our building would be secure. Would there be enough room in the Galilee for all the Jews the President would displace from the post-1967 neighborhoods of Jerusalem? The summer climate in other areas of the country is too hot for us. Go to the United States? Not unless Obama can bring its delivery of medical services into the modern era. Varda speaks German and qualifies for citizenship due to her parents' loss of their German citizenship and what the Germans did to her grandmother. They would probably let me in as well.
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We were saved from such calculations by the news on another station. It provided more coverage of the President's speech, and we saw that it was vintage Obama. The phrases were awesome, but the details could be read to promise everything or nothing. Even Prime Minister Netanyahu was pleased with sections of the speech which he claimed showed his power to persuade the President about important points. According to these signs, we can stay in French Hill and enjoy the new curtains.
Obama's other UN appearances were no less dramatic, and just as empty. He chaired a Security Council session that voted unanimously for a resolution calling for world wide nuclear disarmament, to stop the spread of nuclear arms, and to lower the risk of nuclear terrorism. The members agreed "to seek a safer world for all and to create the conditions for a world without nuclear weapons."
The President said that the resolution was about ensuring that international agreements have real-world heft. “International law is not an empty promise, and treaties must be enforced.”
Let me hear from anyone opposing that.
The Security Council resolution was non-binding, and did not mention North Korea or Iran. Some participants said that it was aimed at North Korea and Iran, but commentators were skeptical about them agreeing about concrete steps.
At a UN meeting on climate change, President Obama admitted that his own country had been a laggard, but now recognized its importance. The world “cannot allow the old divisions that have characterized the climate debate for so many years to block our progress.”
According to the New York Times reporter who covered the meeting, "World leaders . . . made modest proposals . . . underscoring the way domestic political battles still trump what United Nations officials had hoped would be a sense of global urgency."
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