Three lawmakers were to attend a women's empowerment conference in Washington in late March, but Rivlin said he canceled the entire visit because the unrelated visa denial was "an affront to the entire Knesset."
COMMENT: Kahane, who was assassinated in New York 20 years ago, preached expelling Arabs from Israel, the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Israel subsequently banned the Kach Party from parliament in 1988 on the grounds that it was racist and Washington had designated Kach as a terrorist organization.
In a sharp letter to the US ambassador to Israel, Rivlin protested the visa denial, saying that Ben-Ari was a legitimately elected member of parliament. "The United States' allegation that a member of Knesset is a terrorist in unacceptable and is an affront to the entire Knesset," Rivlin said in a statement.
In view of Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's speech before the 2012 AIPAC Conference last week in Washington (during his official visit to the White House), it seems clear, that the Obama Administration was simply being diplomatically polite, while actually harboring annoyance at President Netanyahu's firm and deliberate position to protect Israel from Iran's growing nuclear threat.
Considering that White House openly snubbed PM Netanyahu during his last official visit to Washington probably revealed President Obama's genuine feelings toward the Israeli PM.
As recent as November 2011, French President Nicolas Sarkozy privately told President Obama during a Group of 20 summit meeting in Cannes that he could no longer stand PM Netanyahu and went on to call the Israeli PM a "liar," only to later discover that several French journalists had overheard the conversation. Interestingly, President Obama responded to President Sarkozy by saying, "You are fed up with him, but I have to deal with him even more often than you.”
