Also, as I put earlier, it's a significant international diplomatic faux pass at a time of such great popular unrest among Arab nations, particularly as the US is losing it's hold over areas it considers to be of strategic import (both to itself and of course importantly Israel). The US administration must know this to be so as I'm sure Obama is no dummy, and yet they have taken a course of isolating the US on this issue, not only in the eyes of Arab nations currently undergoing much change, but fellow Western nations also.