Obama’s Faith in anti-Semites and the Cost

Clearly there’s more to hating Israel than meets the eye. By ”more” I mean a human condition - the raising of blind hatred to such a power that incendiary rhetoric is not enough to contain an imperative for violence. And right at this point the leader of the free world commits a cardinal error. By papering over this special hatred, American President Obama tilts the globe towards an ultimate catastrophe.

Pacts with the devil come at a price
Calculated or innocent, the error is mighty convenient for that do or die Iran deal. To get the piece of paper signed it helps Obama to make light of the risk posed by Jew-mad fanatics. It’s not enough to decouple Tehran’s world-wide web of terrorism from the nuclear talks. To placate mullahs and ayatollahs he must downplay the rabid anti-Semitism from that quarter, already guilty of two heinous attacks on Jewish targets, in Borges and Buenos Aries. Now there’s talk of US complicity. Diplomatic sources told World Tribune that the US pressed Argentina to end, or at least fudge the investigation of Iran’s involvement.

Pacts with the devil come at a price. That   was Tehran’s price, and at the wink of an eye Washington paid it. Lately Obama declared himself an honorary member of the ‘tribe.’ And he has always had “Israel’s back” should Iran’s bite prove to be worse than its bark. A President for whom Democrat Jews voted for twice is duty-bound to give assurances of the kind. Certainly he can’t afford to be seen making a Chamberlain look-alike pact with a bunch of Fuhrers.

To drive his message home, Obama gave The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg a morale booster to pass onto American Jewry: they needn’t be overly concerned. “There are deep strains of anti-Semitism in the core regime,” Goldberg’s ‘Pres’ conceded, “but they also are interested in maintaining power.”

Even Goldberg was left wide-eyed. “It’s my belief,” he told the President, “that it is difficult to negotiate with parties that are captive to a conspiratorial anti-Semitic worldview; not because they hold offensive views, but because they hold ridiculous views… I don’t believe that the regime can be counted on to be entirely rational.”

The truth is somewhat more profound. True, there’s nothing calculated in verbal attacks of the kind that Iran makes. Like a volcano they seem to emanate from a deep-down superheated disturbance. But when anti-Semites spew vitriol at Israel they do more than distort facts or recite a miscellany of canards. Seldom do anti-Semites react to provocation, to something that Jews did. When a core figure warns that Iran needs only 24 hours and an excuse to wipe Israel off the map, he’s not mad at Israel’s deeds. No, he is passionately in love with hating Jews.

Anti-Semites are not, as the phrase goes, in their right minds. In a real sense they are out of their minds. A passion can do that. And the passion that collects around Israel is like no other. It consumes whole countries. It sweeps up domestic and international affairs in a maelstrom. It distorts trade. Quite sane leaders when it comes to Israel lose their minds. According to Walter Russell Mead, “nations and political establishments warped by this hatred tend to make one dumb decision after another — starting at shadows, warding off imaginary dangers, misunderstanding the nature of problems they face.”

It’s what Goldberg was getting at, and also what left him nonplussed that his revered leader did not get it. Debriefing Foreign Policy Journal afterwards he bemoaned the great man’s obtuseness. “Obama doesn’t seem to fully understand that anti-Semites actually believe the dangerous and idiotic things they say.” Had he not been a died-in-the-wool Democrat, perhaps Goldberg would have paid closer attention to the President’s own ‘take’ on the subject. Had he done so Obama would not have slipped that cardinal error past him. Here it comes.

“The fact that you are anti-Semitic, or racist, doesn’t preclude you from being interested in survival. It doesn’t preclude you from being rational about the need to keep your economy afloat; it doesn’t preclude you from making strategic decisions about how you stay in power; and so the fact that (Iran’s) supreme leader is anti-Semitic doesn’t mean that this overrides all of his other considerations.”

The dead give-away lurks where? We hit on it here, there and everywhere in that snatch from an Obama lecture.  It makes us want to interject with, ‘How about the Third Reich!’ For how can the President be that ignorant about the last word in Jew-mad regimes? No one taught Obama that the extermination of Jews was not a means to an end but an end in itself? He doesn’t know that the Final Solution was not a part of the war effort, it was fully equal to the whole war effort? He’s not aware that resources needed for winning the war were diverted to the higher priority of putting Jews to death? He never read about the failure of Operation Barbarossa, a turning point in the fortunes of the Third Reich, in no small measure caused by the diversion of trains for Hitler’s genocide project? Hitler condemned his own troops to the pitiless Russian winter so that trains to death camps would continue to run and oven chimneys would continue to smoke.

Perhaps it’s more self-deception than ignorance. But it’s atrocious for a leader with the balance of human survival on his shoulders to deal a joker like this: “…The fact that (Iran’s leaders) are anti-Semitic doesn’t mean that this overrides all their other considerations.”

For the good of the world so fatuous a notion ought not to pass muster. Yet Obama-voting Jews passed it. Tehran warns that it will not abide the “Zionist tumor.” The White House says, don’t worry, the mullahs and ayatollahs will keep cool heads. Tehran declares that destruction of Israel is non-negotiable. Obama says ignore it. Maybe Tehran will play ball. Maybe it will behave so as not to ruin the American leader’s pet project.

Iran of course is not Obama’s only pet project. If it’s learning he’s in want of, there’s a textbook case of Jew-hatred and its cost near the top of Washington’s foreign agenda. Everyone knows how desperately Obama wants to secure a state for Palestinians. Hark to the appeal from the President’s very Jewish heart. If your age-old values still mean anything to you, Oh Israel, set the oppressed Palestinians free.

Now here’s the thing. If Jordan was still occupying the "West Bank" and Egypt was still occupying Gaza, the Palestinians would not be pleading to be set free. They’d be as happy as the day was long under the occupying powers. We know, because for nineteen long years, ending in 1967, Palestinians told the world they were happy not to have a state to call their own. They were more than happy; Arafat and his cronies inscribed it in the founding PLO Charter. We like what we have. Life under Egypt is fine; we accept the King of Jordan as our sovereign ruler. As for the Arab world, it would be wrong to say it was happy.

The wants and wishes of subjugated people in Gaza and "West Bank" never entered the mind of the Arab world. No Arab leader offered his brothers living on Israel’s doorsteps a home to call their own. Only Jewish leaders did that – a couple of times after 1967. Even then Arafat said ‘Nein! and with his Intifadas bit the Jewish hand that proffered the prize. Abbas said ‘Nein! after Arafat – a few times.  

And here are the Palestinians, half a century on, wallowing in self-pity even as they insist they’ll not live with a Jewish state for a neighbour. If that is not a self-inflicted wound from hating the Jew then pigs can fly.