The ‘Jewish’ President
By BRET STEPHENS, WSJ
Should Israelis and pro-Israel Americans take President Obama at his word when he says—as he did at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee policy conference in Washington, D.C., on Sunday—”I have Israel’s back”?
No.
Here is a president who fought tooth-and-nail against the very sanctions on Iran for which he now seeks to reap political credit. He inherited from the Bush administration the security assistance to Israel he now advertises as proof of his “unprecedented” commitment to the Jewish state. His defense secretary has repeatedly cast doubt on the efficacy of a U.S. military option against Iran even as the president insists it remains “on the table.” His top national security advisers keep warning Israel not to attack Iran even as he claims not to “presume to tell [Israeli leaders] what is best for them.”
Oh, and his secretary of state answers a question from a Tunisian student about U.S. politicians courting the “Zionist lobbies” by saying that “a lot of things are said in political campaigns that should not bear a lot of attention.” It seems it didn’t occur to her to challenge the premise of the question.
Still, if you’re looking for evidence of Mr. Obama’s disingenuousness when it comes to Israel, it’s worth referring to what his supporters say about him.
Consider Peter Beinart, the one-time Iraq War advocate who has reinvented himself as a liberal scourge of present-day Israel and mainstream Zionism. Mr. Beinart has a book coming out next month called “The Crisis of Zionism.” Chapter five, on “The Jewish President,” fully justifies the cover price.
Mr. Beinart’s case is that Mr. Obama came to his views about Israel not so much from people like his friend Rashid Khalidi or his pastor Jeremiah Wright. Instead, says Mr. Beinart, Mr. Obama got his education about Israel from a coterie of far-left Chicago Jews who “bred in Obama a specific, and subversive, vision of American Jewish identity and of the Jewish state.”
At the center of this coterie, Mr. Beinart explains, was a Chicago rabbi named Arnold Jacob Wolf. In 1969, Wolf staged a synagogue protest in favor of Black Panther Bobby Seale. In the early 1970s, he founded an organization that met with Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization—this being some 20 years before Arafat officially renounced terrorism. In the early 1990s, Wolf denounced the construction of the Holocaust Museum in Washington.
And, in 1996, the rabbi “was one of [Mr. Obama’s] earliest and most prominent supporters” when he ran for the Illinois state Senate. Wolf later described Mr. Obama’s views on Israel as “on the line of Peace Now”—an organization with a long history of blaming Israel for the Arab-Israeli conflict.
President Obama with AIPAC President Lee Rosenberg at the AIPAC conference in Washington, D.C., on Sunday.
Mr. Obama had other Jewish mentors, too, according to Mr. Beinart. One was Bettylu Saltzman, whose father, developer Philip Klutznick, had joined Wolf in “his break with the Israeli government in the 1970s.” Ms. Saltzman, writes Mr. Beinart, “still seethes with hostility toward the mainstream Jewish groups” and later became active in left-wing Jewish political groups like J Street. Among other things, it was she who “organized the rally against the Iraq War where Obama proclaimed his opposition to an American invasion.”
Ms. Saltzman also introduced Mr. Obama to David Axelrod, himself a longtime donor to a group called the New Israel Fund. For a flavor of the NIF’s world view, a WikiLeaks cable from 2010 noted that an NIF associate director told U.S. embassy officials in Tel Aviv that “the disappearance of a Jewish state would not be the tragedy that Israelis fear since it would become more democratic.”
Other things that we learn about Mr. Obama’s intellectual pedigree from Mr. Beinart: As a student at Columbia, he honed his interests in colonialism by studying with the late pro-Palestinian agit-Prof. Edward Said. In 2004, Mr. Obama “criticized the barrier built to separate Israel and its major settlements from the rest of the West Bank”—the “barrier” meaning the security fence that all-but eliminated the wave of suicide bombings that took 1,000 lives in Israel.
We also learn that, according to one of Mr. Beinart’s sources, longtime diplomat Dennis Ross was brought aboard the Obama campaign as part of what Mr. Beinart calls “Obama’s inoculation strategy” to mollify Jewish voters apprehensive about the sincerity of his commitments to Israel. Not surprisingly, Mr. Ross was a marginal figure in the administration before leaving last year.
In Mr. Beinart’s telling, all this is evidence that Mr. Obama is in tune with the authentic views of the American Jewish community when it comes to Israel, but that he’s out of step with Jewish organizational leadership. Maybe. Still, one wonders why organizations more in tune with those “real” views rarely seem to find much of a base.
But the important question here isn’t about American-Jewish attitudes toward Israel. It’s about the president’s honesty. Is he being truthful when he represents himself as a mainstream friend of Israel—or is he just holding his tongue and biding his time? On the evidence of Mr. Beinart’s sympathetic book, Mr. Obama’s speech at Aipac was one long exercise in political cynicism.
Write to bstephens@wsj.com
very good rongrand.
Nice touch (if I may use that term in the present context).
I’m sure you realize, however, that not everybody (even on this site) will get it right away. Some, perhaps, not at all.
My compliments, all the same.
I hope and pray I am wrong but I am beginning to get the idea the JINO’s are the real problem. Instead of being united, they try too much to please non-Jews. By doing so, he or she tells the world being Jewish is not that important. Wrong. Almost like saying anti-Semitism is okay. Wrong again. It ain’t so.
First and foremost non-Jews should respect Jews for being Jewish period.
Jews should be proud to be Jewish, no reason not to and more reasons than any to be so.
As my friend Yamit has stated many times, assimilation of Jews is not a good thing and I agree.
It seems the world has been trying wipe out the Jews so for G-d’s sake don’t give them a hand in doing so.
By G-d be proud to be Jewish and stop assimilating.
Besides, if you go in a quite room and listen you just may hear G-d calling you home to the land He provided and if you can’t go, at least let your heart go there.
Chi-town “JINO” establishment types like Wolf, a long-time hater of Israel (thank goodness the bastard is dead), Klutznick (him too), Emanuel, Alan So-Low, Jan Schakowsky, Penny Pritizker, and AIPAC’s own Ovomit cheerleader Lee Rosenberg are in reality Jews in name only, or Lox and Bagel Jews. If I had the power to ship them all to Gaza, I would in a heartbeat, along with their little monkey and his friends like Ayers, Dohrn, and Khalidi.
If this reaches a Chi-town Jew who is offended, sorry, but I marched in Skokie in ’78 and I saw how the “Establishment” JINOs there did very little to counter the Nazi threat at the time. In fact, many of them were in cahoots with Aryeh Neier and his American Communist Liberties Union (ACLU) types. Many of them nowadays advise Ovomit on how to “screw” the Jews. Gaza – or the Chicago zoo – is where they belong.
Obama has no affinity for Israel, he was raised in an Islamist environment largely outside of the US, and then by far Left parents who were themselves hostile to Israel.
This is why Obama’s comments about his support for Israel or his “ironclad” committments to Israel’s security come off as phony mouthings, not genuine feelings.
Moreover, as an adult, Obama got much of his anti Israel feelings confirmed by the venomous anti Israel and anti Semitic rantings of Reverend Jeremiah Wright.
This is why he surrounds himself with like minded people like Axelrod and Rahm Emmanuel, Jew who themselves despise their Judaism and Israel, and thus support Obama’s very own bigotry.
Yamit,
As much as I would like to see something like it, the US has not “declared war” on Iran. In the first place, the Constitutional mandate that the US Congress, and only the US Congress, is the body that issues a “declaration of war” is not fulfilled here: A “declaration of war” is not a declaration of an intent to start a war; it is a DECLARATION that a state of war already exists; and by so declaring the fact, the Conress empowers the President and others to act accordingly. Those congressmen did no such thing: They simply spilled out more meaningless rhetoric, not too different from the double-tongued sophistry that Obama regularly spews forth.
The opening piece is right on the money: Obama does not “have Israel’s back”; and thank God he doesn’t — he has a knife in his hand.
Disturbing? Not if you’ve seen it before. It was evident at their first meeting. It was blatant at every speech Obama made to AIPAC or any other Jewish group.
It’s too pointed to be unconscious or out of his control; it’s a dog whistle to make his intentions Krystall clear.
And it’s intended to psych BB out and unnerve him. A thousand yard stare can’t be pleasant when you’re three feet away.
And what is the antecedent of “IT”?
— After a Jewish state disappeared, WHAT “would become more democratic”?
Funny, how every single time I’ve heard him use that phrase, I’ve thought the same thing.
Of course Obama has our back and it’s ready for his blade. Notice how Obama is pointing a finger at the GOP saying “those crackpots want war with Iran”. Obama is for sale to the highest bidder, let’s never forget that. In the end, Obama is just another guy with implanted electrodes in his head and is our version of the Manchurian candidate. He’s programmed and has had his pillows fluffed his entire life. An impostor wrapped in deceit and treachery with false birth certificate and name. All of this Obama jive is aided by the fact we are a very mixed group and not everything good for Israel is good for Jews. We are not all Zionists by any stretch of the imagination yet it is assumed we are. IT would not be the first time we cause ourselves great angst and damage.
I think that the Iranians did an end run against the west.
By inviting inspections of sites that were formerly out of bounds, the U.N.,Russia, E.U. , China, India all agreed to commencing talks. With talks you may safely preclude military action. Those foxey buggers pulled the (Persian) carpet from under the Israelis. Obama spoke nice but said absolutely no attack. And no attack it will be.
Netanyahu Controls Obama’s Fate
By Dick Morris And Eileen McGann on March 6, 2012
Watch That Body Language! Obama versus Bibi
Not just the American MSN lies about this but also the Canadian MSN. S don’t pretend it’s just Obama.
…
If you listen to the CBC everything is just hunky dory with the USA and Israel and by golly Ogoilema is doing his dam-nest to stop those meanies.. Hmmm.. Iranians or Israelis..never mind it’s all the same to the Canadian- American sheeple.
Ever wonder why the MSN tells the same lies to BOTH Canadians and Americans. No alarm bells ringing inside those pro elite indoctrinated heads?
Jews are bad news and so are the Iranians but who cares it’s taken care of so no need to worry – it’s in the MSN and that’s all the truth that matters and all ye ever need to know.
Prime Minister of Israel Binyamin Netanyahu at AIPAC 2012
(Fox News) US military leaders urge Israel not to attack Iran
US DECLARES WAR ON IRAN.