Joan Swirsky

Obama’s Jewish Problem
May 19, 2009
 

In times past, coalminers working in the depths of the earth took along caged canaries. As long as the canaries warbled, the miners knew they were safe from the methane and carbon monoxide that would kill them in minutes. But when the tiny songbirds stopped singing, the miners knew to run for their lives.

Jews have always been the canaries in the coal mines of civilization, serving as a warning of impending doom to those who believed, as Churchill said, that the crocodile – of tyranny – would eat them last. The Jews of Hitler’s Germany who listened carefully to the savage dictator’s early words, and watched as his promises of hope and change morphed into incremental losses of freedom and ultimately genocide, fled their country and survived, while the six-million who said "it can’t happen here” – as well as six-million non-Jews who believed they were immune – perished in the largest mass-murder in history.

After Hitler’s brutal annihilation of half the Jews on earth, the straggling survivors established the State of Israel, which in less than 50 years became a formidable power, and also a world obsession – admired and respected but also envied and loathed.

Since Israel’s founding in 1948, America has been the Jewish state’s most steadfast supporter, even when this or that president was not particularly enamored of "the Jews” – with the stark exception of Jimmy Carter who, to this day, oozes Jew-hatred from his aging pores. Why? Because, unlike every state in the Middle East and every anti-freedom regime on earth, Israel embodies all of our country’s values – the ideal of democracy, the rule of law, a determination to fight the enemies of Western civilization, and a fidelity to the Judeo-Christian ethics that have made both America and Israel shining lights among freedom-loving nations.

Today, with the advent of the Obama administration, Israeli canaries are chirping loudly, warning the entire world, particularly America but also Europe, that if Israel is sacrificed to Obama’s far-left anti-Israel and anti-American agenda, then freedom-loving, God-fearing countries around the world will be suffocated and sacrificed to a new American caliphate – to the harsh and inflexible rule of Islamic theology, philosophy and law.

Sharpening the Machete

To prepare for his meeting on May 18 with Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, President Obama prepared a menu of poison pills – the kind given to people with the same Hobson’s Choice that Mafia attorney Tom Hagen gave to the imprisoned and about-to-testify-before-Congress Frankie Pentangeli in "Godfather Two” – either commit suicide or we’re going to kill you. Examples abound.

▪ Just the other day, Obama announced he will be addressing the Arab and Muslim world from a mosque in the city of Al-Azhar in Egypt – a location writer Ruth S. King has described as "the locus of Koranic-inspired Jihad.” Indeed, this Sunni bastion supports suicide-bombings. And only last week, according to JihadWatch.org, Sheikh Ali Osman of the Egyptian government said "Pigs are Jews cursed by Allah, and thus can be lawfully slaughtered.”

▪ This week, by Executive Order, Obama directed the expenditure of $20.3 million – of U.S. taxpayers’ dollars – in "migration assistance" to the Palestinian refugees and "conflict victims" in Gaza, which allows hundreds of thousands of Palestinians with ties to Hamas and its Islamic Resistance Movement to resettle in the United States. Presidential Determination No. 2009-15 of January 27, 2009 was recorded in the Federal Register on February 4.

▪ Also this week, Obama submitted a budget to Congress that while increasing military aid to Israel for the Arrow 3, cut in half aid for the Arrow 2 and significantly reduced aid for short-range missile interceptors, just as Iran is strengthening its conventional ballistic missile force.

▪ This month, Obama refused to meet with Netanyahu for the P.M.’s planned visit to address the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) Conference in D.C.

▪ At the same AIPAC meeting Obama's chief of staff Rahm Emanuel reportedly told donors that America's ability to face Iran depended on Israel's ability to make progress with the Palestinians, once again echoing the tired Leftist canard that all conflicts in the Middle East are the result not of the jihadist mentality, but rather the failure of Israel to accept their virulently anti-Semitic propaganda (in the media and in schools), non-stop homicide bombings, and relentless rocket attacks..

▪ In numerous Obama-sanctioned public statements, his henchmen have, in the common vernacular, put the screws to Israel, among them Secretary of State Hillary Clinton who threatened: "For Israel to get the kind of strong support it's looking for vis-à-vis Iran, it can't stay on the sideline with respect to the Palestinians and the peace efforts ... they go hand in hand," and National Security Adviser Gen. James Jones who recently told a European foreign minister that the U.S. is planning to build an anti-Israel coalition with the Arabs and Europe to compel Israel to surrender Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem to the Palestinians.

▪ Obama let it be known that his plan for a "two-state solution” was perfectly in-sync with the wipe-Israel-off-the-map crowd, including terrorist-sponsoring Syria and Saudi Arabia, among others. And what sweet nothings do you suppose Obama whispered into the ears of Iran’s Ahmadinejad that just prompted the sudden release from jail of the Iranian-American journalist Roxana Saberi?

▪ And let’s not forget that Obama’s first phone call to a head of state was to Mahmoud Abbas, the leader of the Fatah party in the Palestinian territory, and who also wrote his doctoral thesis denying the Holocaust. Did I mention Abbas’ loyal second-in-command fealty to "the father of terrorism,” Yasir Arafat?

▪ Or that Obama gave his first TV interview to Al Arabia television.

▪ Or that Obama summarily dismissed all charges against the Muslim murderers of 17 American sailors on the USS Cole in Yemen in 2001.

▪ Or that Obama, according to David Patten at Newsmax.com, "is preparing to reinstate a fraud-riddled immigration program that has brought over 36,000 Somalis into the United States under questionable circumstances.”

▪ Or that Obama bowed so repugnantly on his recent European trip to the Saudi Arabian potentate.

This "genocidal hostility toward Israel,” as writer Mona Charen describes it, is Obama & Co.’s way of insuring that they succeed where former administrations have failed in bringing about the ever-elusive "two-state” solution – a "solution” Leftists like Obama have cravenly tried to delude much of the world into believing will magically resolve the world’s other conflicts.

Anne Bayefsky of www.EyeOnTheUN.org explains Obama’s nefarious plans perfectly: "President Obama unveiled a new strategy for throwing Israel to the wolves. It takes the form of enthusiasm for the United Nations and international interlopers of all kinds. Instead of ensuring strong American control over the course of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations or the Arab-Israeli peace process, the Obama administration is busy inserting an international mob between the U.S. and Israel. The thinking goes: If Israel doesn't fall into an American line, Obama will step out of the way, claim his hands are tied, and let the U.N. and other international gangsters have at their prey.”

The Obama formula, based not on an American or Israeli plan but rather on the "Saudi Peace Initiative,” involves:

▪ Forcing Israel to withdraw to 1967 cease-fire lines, or as the late Israeli foreign minister Abba Eban called them, "the borders of Auschwitz."

▪ Demanding that Israel withdraw from the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, the Golan Heights and eastern Jerusalem, leaving behind important Biblical sites, the Temple Mount, and the country’s border security.

▪ Surrendering of over one-third of Israel's water supply.

▪ Dividing Jerusalem in half, to make way for a Palestinian capital.

▪ Coercing Israel to join the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which writer Ariel Cohen of the Heritage Foundation said is tantamount to "demanding that a man in a rough neighborhood give up his shotgun when the criminal next door is getting a Kalashnikov.”

▪ Inundating Israel with millions of Palestinian refugees and their relatives from 1948, thus stripping the country of its Jewish ethos.

▪ De facto surrounding Israel with jihadists who live and die to kill the "infidel” Jews. As Judith Apter Klinhoffer writes, "Let us not forget, Iranian satellite Hezbollah is perched on Israel's Northern border and Iranian satellite Hamas on the Southern one. An Iranian satellite on the Western one would complete the encirclement."

As King Abdullah of Jordan told journalists after his recent meeting with President Obama – clearly referring to the 57-member Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) – "That is not a two-state solution; it is a 57-state solution.” Mmmm...Obama himself said during his campaign that he had visited "all 57” of the United States! And let’s not forget that during an interview with George Stephanopoulos, he said ...”in my Muslim faith...” – which he didn’t correct but his host rushed to correct.

Going In for the Kill

In spite of more than a half-century of Arab belligerence, war-mongering, suicide bombings, and virulent anti-Israel propaganda blaring from mosques and the media, brainwashing school texts, maps that eliminate the Jewish state, and obdurate resistance to all peace initiatives, Caroline Glick says that "as far as the Obama administration is concerned, Israel is the only obstacle to peace....the Obama White House’s bald attempt to force Israel to take full blame for the Arab world’s hostility toward it is not the only way that it is casting Israel as the scapegoat for the region’s ills. In their bid to open direct diplomatic ties with Iran, Obama and his advisors are also blaming Israel for Iran’s nuclear program.”

"Even Ethan Bronner of the The New York Times pointed out,” Glick continues, "that Obama's Middle East policy is not based on facts. If it were, the so-called `two state solution,’ which has failed repeatedly since 1993, would not be its centerpiece. Obama's Middle East policy is based on ideology, not reality. Consequently, it is immune to rational argument. By blaming Israel for the absence of peace in the Middle East while ignoring the Palestinians' refusal to accept Israel's right to exist; by seeking to build an international coalition with Europe and the Arabs against Israel while glossing over the fact that at least the Arabs share Israel's concerns about Iran; by exposing Israel's nuclear arsenal and pressuring Israel to disarm while in the meantime courting the ayatollahs like an overeager bridegroom, the Obama administration is telling Israel that regardless of what it does, and what objective reality is, as far as the White House is concerned, Israel is to blame.”

Sound familiar? As I documented in recent articles – "Obama’s Revenge” and "The President Who Hates His Country” – Obama and his Leftist cronies revile Western civilization and all those evil white men who established the U.S. Constitution and the most productive, most generous and freest country in world history, as he so amply demonstrated in his recent apologize-for-America trip to Europe.

In an article, "The United Hates of America," David Solway comments on,

"...the long and destabilizing campaign of the American Left against the political interests of its own country and its rush to embrace the dictatorial agendas of America’s most resolute enemies...`the unholy alliance’ between the radical Left and the Islamic Right.” Solway also comments on a new book by Jamie Glazov, "United in Hate.”

"Glazov’s "analysis,” Solway continues, "seems the only conceivable means of making sense of the leftist orgy of national treason, betrayal of genuine liberal principles, and passionate support of tyrants and demagogues. It also clarifies the bizarre and singular marriage between the Left and Islamism. Glazov writes that the `common denominator’ between two such improbable bedfellows – the one ostensibly promoting gender equality, freedom of speech, and a pluralistic society, and the other predicated on gender apartheid, theocratic coercion, and conformity to Sharia law – is a belief in redemptive violence. This is why so many on the secular Left...exulted in the carnage of 9/11, as did their fundamentalist counterparts in the Islamic world, like the Palestinians who danced in the street and handed out candies to celebrate the great event. For the members of the anti-American Left, their papers and speeches were the candies they distributed to mark this sublime and long-awaited triumph.

"Yet another important common denominator, Glazov explains, between the Western Left and Islamism is their shared hatred for the state of Israel, the only true, democratic nation in the Middle East and the West’s forward position in the war against an undeviating adversary. The Left abominates Israel as a mini-America, that is, as a colonial occupier of third world innocents, and as a symbol of all the things it loathes: `modernity, freedom, corporate capitalism and globalization – all things reviled by Muslim fundamentalists. It has thus allied itself with militant Islam on the principle that `my enemy’s enemy is my friend.’”

So we know where Obama and his henchmen-and-women stand. And we know that they’ve read every Jew-hating, Israel-hating word of The Fatah (Palestinian) Constitution and agree with every defamatory, racist, genocidal tenet of this kill-the-Jews-and-destroy-Israel manifesto, which they apparently find less objectionable than the U.S. Constitution.

Obama’s Anti-Israel Collaborators

Hillary Clinton, Secretary of State, has long and deep ties with the enemies of America and Israel. This is what Dick Morris, former advisor to President Clinton, and his wife, Eileen McGann, wrote last year:

"[Hillary’s] relationship with terrorists began in the mid-1980s when she served on the Board of the New World Foundation, which gave funds to the Palestine Liberation Organization [when] the PLO was officially recognized by the U.S. government as a terrorist organization. In 1996, the First Lady initiated an outreach program to bring Muslim leaders to the White House. But, as terrorism expert Steve Emerson noted in the Wall Street Journal, `Curiously, nearly all of the leaders...came from Islamic fundamentalist organizations....Among these radical groups was the American Muslim Alliance (AMA) and the Council on American-Islamic Relations, both groups that support Hamas...The Palestinian terrorists know that Hillary hears their point of view...Abu Hamed, leader of the Al Aqsa Brigades in Gaza, [said], `We just hope that she will go until the end and change American policy.”

Susan Rice, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, has advocated ending all U.S. military aid to Israel. Ed Lasky at AmericanThinker writes that,

"Rice was John Kerry's chief foreign policy adviser when he ran for President. One of the major steps Kerry suggested for dealing with the Middle East was to appoint James Baker and Jimmy Carter as negotiators. When furor erupted at the prospect of two of the most ardent foes of Israel being suggested to basically ride "roughshod" over Israel, Kerry backtracked and blamed his staff for the idea. His staff was Susan Rice.”

Lee Hamilton, as Lasky writes, is a key Obama advisor on Middle Eastern affairs. A former Indiana Representative, Hamilton led the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group, which concluded, among other things, that the withdrawal of troops from Iraq should be coordinated with Syria and Iran! And that the U.S. should develop Syrian "goodwill” by pressuring Israel to surrender the Golan Heights and leave the West Bank – but not a word about dismantling Hamas or Hezbollah! Hamilton wrote in the NY Times that Hezbollah’s "hatred was created by Israel; it wasn’t there at the beginning.”

Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s National Security Advisor, has been one of Israel’s most consistently hostile critics and Hamas’s most ardent supporters, as well as a staunch admirer (both in writing and verbally) of Stephen Walt’s and John Mearsheimer’s virulently anti-Israel book, "The Israel Lobby,” which, among other things, contends that Jewish pressure, and not shared values, binds America and Israel together.

James ("F... the Jews”) Baker, among the harshest detractors of Israel, has often engaged in raw anti-Semitic remarks, is known for coddling Middle East dictators (including Syria’s Assad), and has been heavily invested (through the Carlyle Group) in the Israel-hating country of Saudi Arabia. In fact, Baker’s law firm defended the Saudi Defense Minister who was sued for alleged complicity by the families of the World Trade Center victims.

Samantha Power, now on Obama’s National Security Council, has advocated ending all U.S. military aid to Israel and written of her willingness to,

"...alienate a domestic constituency of tremendous political and financial import [American Jews]...it may more crucially mean sacrificing...billions of dollars, not in servicing Israel’s military, but actually investing in the state of Palestine.”

Believe me, the above is the short list. As Glick has written: "In the past, while anti-Israel politicians, policy makers and opinion shapers were accepted in Washington, they would not have felt comfortable brandishing their anti-Israel positions as qualifying credentials for high position...today in Washington there are powerful circles of political players for whom a person's anti-Israel bona fides are his strongest suit."

Obama’s Court Jews

Oh, I can hear the blather as I type: But what about all the Jews who voted for Obama and are in his cabinet and among his advisors? Make no mistake – Obama’s Court Jews are identical to those of the past who financed, supported, licked the boots of and sold out their people in order to gain the personal influence, privileges, wealth, and protection that the "nobles” afforded them. They helped Roman emperors kill Jews. They helped Hitler kill Jews. But after their groveling and traitorous service, they were blamed for economic downturns and used as scapegoats to explain away the failures of the evil regimes and leaders they abetted. Fools and dupes, to a person!

Journalist Melanie Phillips writes that,

"Obama is attempting to throw Israel under the Islamist bus, and he’s getting American Jews to do his dirty work for him...none of this, however, should come as the slightest surprise to anyone who paid any attention to Obama’s background, associations and friendships before he became President and to the cabal of Israel-bashers, appeasers and Jew-haters he appointed to his administration, with a few useful idiots thrown in for plausible deniability.”

In an article entitled The Final Solution: What Hitler Didn’t Finish, Obama Will, blogger Daniel Greenfield (Sultanknish.blogspot.com) explains:

"Obama has been clever about putting his Jewish appointees front and center. Like many minorities, some American Jews suffer from self-esteem problems that are soothed when they see a seeming acceptance. Of course what they fail to realize is that exploitation is not acceptance. And that Obama's appointees are creatures of his backers, Nazi collaborators like Soros, who have nothing but contempt for Jews, individually or collectively.

While outwardly courting Jews, Obama's people have also been quietly shoving Jewish organizations and their leaders into a corner. Within the Jewish organizational world there has been a silent but deadly takeover of major Jewish groups by left wing radicals. Former alumni of the far left wing and anti-Israel groups like Breira or Coname in the 70's have been elevated to key positions in such organizations as the UJA Federation. Behind the scenes any Jewish leaders who expressed even doubts about Obama during the primaries were intimidated and silenced. The overall idea is to keep a happy face pasted on American Jewry while the knives are out in the dark.”

But why would people who hate Jews surround themselves with so many of them? As Don Vito Corleone warned his son Michael, "Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer.” As much as the enemies of Jews hate them, they also fear them. They can’t figure out how a historically besieged people – whose population today is about 14 million, as compared to, say, Muslims, whose population is 1.3 billion – have not only managed to survive the Jew-targeting Inquisition, Crusades., pogroms. Concentration camps and pandemic outbreaks of anti-Semitism, but to flourish and rise to the top echelons of any community they’ve ever lived in. In short, they want the brains of the Jews and also the ability to blame them when things go wrong.

But don’t these smart Jews know they’re being used? Yes and no. They’ve studied history, but they think that the passage of time has made them immune from mistakes of the past. Of course they’re wrong. Fools and dupes always get fooled and duped. Unfortunately – actually, stupidly – too many Jews, over the ages, have been seduced by the hope-and-change rhetoric of the Left, so yearning are they to be "included” and "accepted” into cultures that have ultimately rejected them.

Just Who Are Obama’s Court Jews?

Rahm Emanuel, White House Chief of Staff and, in my opinion, Chief of Dupes. As writer Judith Apter Klinghoffer reminds us: "By choosing a Jewish chief of staff to do the dirty work, Obama showed himself a `worthy’ successor to LBJ. Arthur Goldberg was LBJ's point man to read the riot act to Israel. It was his Jewish U.N. representative that was charged with berating Israel for daring to retaliate against Palestinian acts of terror in 1966 and to inform Israel that it should not rely on any American assistance against Nasser in may 1967.” And now Emanuel is taking the bait, currying favor for his figurative 10-minutes of fame, the better to sell out his Israeli-born father and the land his father heroically fought for in the early years of Israel’s existence.

David Axelrod, the chief strategist and media advisor for Obama's 2008 presidential campaign and now a White House insider, is not front-and-center about his hero’s antagonism toward Israel. But as the old chestnut says: Silence is Consent!

Robert Malley is another fan of Hamas and Hezbollah. According to Wikipedia, Malley is the son of Simon Malley, an Egyptian-born Jewish journalist, and Barbara Silverstein, a New Yorker who worked for the U.N. delegation of the Algerian National Liberation Front. Both loathed Israel and apparently passed their toxic DNA onto their son. Malley has often called for an end to all aid to Israel.

Dennis Ross, Obama’s special adviser for the Persian Gulf and Southwest Asia, which includes Iran, participated in 12 years of failed Israeli-Palestinian "peace” efforts. In 2001, he suggested that future negotiations ought to be based on "something the parties have put on the table, and not [what] the United States has put on the table." Translated today, that would mean listening to the 22 hostile states that surround Israel and saying "majority rules!”

George Soros, the Budapest-born multibillionaire (and Nazi collaborator) has devoted his entire life, as writer Srdja Trifkovic points out, to supporting "increased government spending and tax increases, drug legalization, euthanasia, open borders and immigration, immigrant entitlements, feminism, free abortion-on-demand, affirmative action, and gay rights” and "remains primarily committed to destroying the remaining bastions of the family, sovereign nationhood, and Christian Faith...” He is also devoted to vilifying Israel and funding numerous groups that work unstintingly to bring about its destruction.

Again, this is the short list. But the entire list of Obama "advisors” on Middle East affairs is comprised of hard-core Leftists who want nothing more than to see America humiliated and Israel destroyed. As Lasky has said, "This is the company Barack Obama keeps.”

Consequences Be Damned

Melanie Phillips calls the Obama administration’s "malice” toward Israel "incomprehensible in its suicidal stupidity.”

It is trying to make Israel play the role of Czechoslovakia in 1938, when Britain under Neville Chamberlain told it that if it didn’t submit to the Nazis it would stand alone – with the result that the following year, Hitler invaded Poland. Determined to prove that history repeats itself the second time as tragedy, America is trying to force Israel to destroy its security by accepting the creation of a terrorist Iranistan on its doorstep, under the threat that otherwise the U.S. will not help protect its security by de-fanging Iran...but in doing so, the Obama administration is jeopardizing the security of America itself and the free world, not to mention the Arab states which have good reason to fear Iranian regional hegemony. 

Indeed. As DEBKAfile reports:

▪ Tehran itself will not let Washington dictate the limits of its expanding influence (or) nuclear aspirations.

▪ Cairo and Riyadh will resist with all their might the U.S. bid to anoint Iran the crowning Middle East-Gulf power [and are] extremely concerned by Obama's public endorsement of Turkey as the senior Muslim power in the Eastern Mediterranean and Central Asia, a boost for Ankara's aspirations to resuscitate the Ottoman Empire.

▪ Jerusalem will resist being cast into a peripheral role in the strategic and military processes going forward with regard to Iran, the Palestinians, Syria and their terrorist arms, Hezbollah and Hamas, all of which bear pivotally on Israel's future existence.

▪ Like Egypt and Saudi Arabia, the Netanyahu government may not accept being crushed between two hostile regional powers, Iran and Turkey, whose aggressive pretensions Washington is promoting.

Amil Taheri points out:

"Convinced that the Obama administration is preparing to retreat from the Middle East, Iran’s Khomeinist regime is intensifying its goal of regional domination. It has targeted six close allies of the U.S.: Egypt, Lebanon, Bahrain, Morocco, Kuwait and Jordan, all of which are experiencing economic and/or political crises...Khomeinist propaganda is trying to portray Iran as a rising ‘superpower’ in the making while the United States is presented as the ‘sunset power.’ The message is simple: The Americans are going, and we are coming...with pro-American and other democratic groups disheartened by the perceived weakness of the Obama administration, Tehran hopes its allies will win all the elections planned for this year in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon and the Palestinian territories.”

And writer Tom Gross says that,

"...the threat of a nuclear arsenal in the hands of the only government in the world (Iran) that promotes suicide bombing as a matter of state policy (by its client militias in Gaza, Lebanon, Iraq and elsewhere), and celebrates `martyrdom of its fellow Muslims’ in such attacks, is a threat quite unlike any the world has ever seen. The combination of weapons of mass destruction and jihadist ideology poses a problem of much greater magnitude than that when secular dictatorships and semi-dictatorships, such as Russia, China and North Korea and Pakistan, possess nuclear bombs. In addition to posing an existential threat to Israel, a nuclear Iran could mean the end of American influence in the Middle East. Tehran, not Washington would dominate oil in the region.”

But none of these threats, not only to the Middle East but also to America, are of any import to President Obama. In his single-minded obsession to appease our enemies and get rid of his "Jewish problem,” he is willing to sacrifice the safety and security of America, the country he can’t stop apologizing for. Or is that he has a Muslim problem and the Jews and Israel are simply in the way?