JTA Reports: Responding to Obama’s pledge to investigate the circumstances of an attack that killed four U.S. diplomats in Libya last month, Romney assailed Obama’s overall foreign policy record, and pivoted to the president’s at-times strained relationship with the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
“This calls into question the president’s whole policy in the Middle East. Look what’s happening in Syria, in Egypt, now in Libya,” Romney said at the Hofstra University debate in Long Island, N.Y., on Tuesday night. “Consider the distance between ourselves and — and Israel, the president said that — that he was going to put daylight between us and Israel.”
Obama, in a meeting in July 2009 with Jewish leadership was asked whether he would preserve the policies of the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations of “no daylight,” or keeping disputes with Israel private.
At that meeting, Obama replied that the practice of not making public disputes with Israel did not advance the peace process.
