Obama’s Israel Doctrine

When people say "I hate to say I told you so," they rarely mean it. What they really mean is, "I was right, and I am glad to tell you so." A year ago, I wrote,     "Obama apparently sees the world and Israel from a Muslim perspective. Those who think clearly about these issues must conclude that President Obama is influenced by a quiet strain of anti-Semitism picked up from elements of the black community, leftist colleagues, Muslim associations and Jeremiah Wright. For the first time in her history, Israel may find the President of the United States openly siding with her enemies. Those who believe that Israel must be protected had better be ready for the fight."


I really do hate to say, "I told you so." I did not vote for Barack Obama, but I hoped he would surprise me and not be the kind of President that his background portended. Most Americans, even those who didn't vote for him, wanted to believe that he would transcend the negative forces which might have influenced his thinking. Perhaps the anti-Semitism to which he had been exposed had not gotten into his intellectual DNA. He attempted to reassure us.

During his Presidential campaign, he declared in a speech to AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) that Jerusalem should remain the undivided capital of Israel. Within days of that speech he reversed his position and said that what happens to Jerusalem is a matter of negotiation between Israel and the Palestinians. When Israel permitted the building of housing -- i.e., "settlements" -- in east Jerusalem, he condemned the activity and made a "settlement freeze" the prerequisite to resuming peace talks. When Netanyahu visited the White House after the "settlement" flap, Obama treated him like a child, leaving him in the White House basement. His positions and policies have turned out to mirror and in some cases be more anti-Israel than the Palestinians.

In his much-hyped speech in Cairo, reaching out to the "Muslim World," Obama drew a moral equivalence between the "suffering" of the Palestinians and the Holocaust against the Jewish people. He said, "Around the world the Jewish people were persecuted for centuries, and anti-Semitism in Europe culminated in an unprecedented Holocaust." But he went on to say, "On the other hand it is also undeniable that Palestinians...have suffered in pursuit of a homeland."

To equate these two vastly different historical realities borders on the delusional. There is no equivalence between a systematic effort to annihilate the entire Jewish people and the problem of "dislocation" -- as Obama refers to it -- of the Palestinians. If there is any similarity at all, it is that many Palestinians, like the Nazis, want to kill all Jews.

Article 7 of the Hamas Charter -- purported to be a quote from Mohammed -- says, "The Day of Judgment will not come until Muslims fight the Jews (killing the Jews). When the Jews will hide behind stones and trees, the stones and trees will say, O Moslems, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him." It is Palestinians who want to commit a holocaust against Israel. There is no such threat or desire on the part of Israel against the Palestinians. The Jewish nation simply wants to live in peace.

Helen Thomas, an Obama devotee, recently said, the Jews need to "get the hell out of Palestine." Obama is silent. For years Jews in Israel could hardly sleep for fear that Hamas rockets would land in their homes. Yet when Israel takes reasonable action to search ships to prevent weapons from entering Gaza, she is condemned. Obama is silent. Reuters doctored the pictures of the recent blockade confrontation -- editing out weapons in the hands of the ship's crew -- so as to perpetuate the narrative of Israeli aggression. Obama is silent. Perhaps if he had not spent twenty years in the church of a rabid anti-Semite, President Obama's muteness would not speak so loudly. However, given his close association with Islam and with one of Louis Farrakhan's best friends, his silence must be interpreted as consent. I wish I were wrong about this President, but facts are stubborn things.

Since I sounded the first warning a year ago, Iran is on the brink of having nuclear weapons, and enemies of the Jews have gotten the message that if they attack Israel, this President will do nothing about it. Relations between Israel and the U.S. are the most strained they've ever been, and they will remain tense until Obama is voted out of office. His foreign policy doctrine toward Israel boils down to four words: he doesn't like them. Therefore, things are going to get worse before they get better. Nonetheless, Israel is not alone and never will be. Her defenders will stay in the fight until every Jew sits under his own vine and his own fig tree and no one shall make them afraid.