President Obama on Fox News. Photo: Screenshot.

The latest dispatch from TIME magazine’s Jerusalem bureau chief Karl Vick would just be laughable if it wasn’t so downright ridiculous.

In a piece entitled “Cheer Up, Obama. Israel Is Happy With Your Syria Plan,” Vick purports to gauge “the verdict from Israel” on the outcome of President Obama’s diplomatic oscillation this week over what to do about the alleged recent use of chemical weapons by the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

After earlier bringing the U.S. to the brink of a strike against Syria, Obama ended up agreeing in principle to a Russian proposal to allow Assad to give up his WMD arsenal to international control.

According to Vick, Israel then fell in love with President Obama. He is now “being hailed as a model of principled resolve, a Churchillian figure,” he claims.

“Rather than focusing on what Obama could not do — line up anywhere near a Congressional majority for a military strike — Israelis focused on what he did: Use the consistent threat of military force to extract a promise from Syria and its most powerful patron, Russia, to remove tons of chemical weapons from Israel’s northern border,” Vick writes.

Unashamedly, the backup for his grand pronouncement on the consensus, mood and ultimate “verdict” of “Israelis” amounts to a series of handpicked opinion quotations from a total of two notoriously left wing Israeli newspapers.

Seeking to make his sources appear more diversified, Vick attempts a dishonest journalistic sleight of hand. After citing a columnist who writes for Israeli daily Yediot Ahronot, he refers to another writer’s article published by Ynet.com, described by Vick simply as a “leading news site.” He neglects to mention that Ynet.com is just the online address for Yediot Ahronot’s website.

In his assessment of the Israeli position on Obama’s maneuvers, Vick omits such matters as say, what the democratically elected Prime Minister or President of the Jewish state, who each represent polar opposite sides of the country’s political spectrum, had to say on the matter.

“Hinting at dismay with Obama, PM says Israel can rely only on itself,” a Times of Israel headline declared. An Algemeiner headline read: “Israeli President Peres: ‘Assad Cannot be Trusted’ to Honor Agreement on Chemical Weapons.”

Politico had this evaluation of the Israeli media’s view: “A review of Israeli media by POLITICO shows a few clear story lines: Vladimir Putin has outplayed the president; Iran is strengthened; and Obama is a weak leader that Israel may no longer be able to count on to help stop Iran from developing nuclear weapons.” And USA Today declared that the “Russian plan on Syria adds to uncertainty in Israel.”

One thing is for certain, Israel is not at all happy with Obama’s Syria plan.

From his writing it is clear that Karl Vick knows approximately as much about what Israelis think as an Amazonian Pirahã elder. Either that, or he is simply an agenda driven Brezhnev-era-like apparatchik who, unfortunately for well-meaning Americans, somehow ended up writing for the most widely read news-magazine in America.

The author is the Editor-in-Chief of The Algemeiner and director of the GJCF and can be e-mailed at defune@gjcf.com.