Post-American Presidency (15 page)

Silver also observed that “Brooks does not bother to note that Israel goes to such lengths to avoid civilian casualties that it often gives up the element of surprise in order to warn Palestinian civilians who may be in harm’s way before Israel targets nearby Hamas terrorists.”

Like Brzezinski, Brooks also indulged in the familiar anti-Semite’s complaint: that a few simple criticisms of Israel got one slapped with accusations of… anti-Semitism. (Neither, of course, seemed inclined to own up to how they had prejudged the case and stacked the deck against Israel.) Brooks enunciated this complaint in this way in 2006: “Publish something sharply critical of Israeli government policies and you’ll find out. If you’re lucky, you’ll merely discover that you’ve been uninvited to some dinner parties. If you’re less lucky, you’ll be the subject of an all-out attack by neoconservative pundits and accused of rabid anti-Semitism.”
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CHUCK HAGEL

Former senator Chuck Hagel (R-NE) would probably have agreed with Brooks. According to
The
Jerusalem Post
, he was “one of a handful
of senators who frequently didn’t sign AIPAC-backed letters related to Israel and the peace process during his time in the Senate and opposed additional sanctions on Iran.”

Apparently, like Brooks, he has faced criticism for these anti-Israel stances—and has complained that “the Jewish lobby intimidates a lot of people.”
⁵⁰

Yet Hagel himself doesn’t seem to have been particularly intimidated. In the Senate he amassed a significant track record as one of a hard-line hater of Israel who would not affix his name even to the most innocuous pro-Israel initiative. When all but four senators signed a pro-Israel statement in 2000, Hagel was one of the holdouts. The next year, he was again among the few senators—eleven this time—who refused to add their names to a statement urging George W. Bush not to meet with Yasir Arafat as long as the Palestinian groups under his control continued to pursue violence against Israel. In 2005, Hagel, along with twenty-six other senators, opposed a call to the Palestinian Authority to disqualify terror groups from participating in elections. And when twelve senators wrote to the European Union in 2006 asking that the EU join the United States in classifying Hizbullah as a terrorist organization, Hagel was once again one of the few.
⁵¹

Hagel wasn’t intimidated, and Barack Hussein Obama wasn’t either. In late October 2009 he appointed Hagel cochair of his Intelligence Advisory Board.
⁵²
And in a particularly piquant symbolic move, the appointment was announced at the anti-Israel Jewish group J Street’s first annual conference—by Steve Clemons of George Soros’s New America Foundation.
⁵³

And the effect of all this showed in his policies, beginning almost immediately when he took office.

It bodes ill for Jews just how comfortable and at ease Obama obviously is with proud anti-Semites and Israel haters. Obama has appointed all these people, but has concealed their true natures.

THEN THERE IS OBAMA HIMSELF

During the 2008 presidential election, Barack Obama’s Web site, Organizing for America, hosted a series of vile anti-American, Jew-hating posts and pieces.

The anti-Semitic onslaught was overwhelming. It included numerous heinous calls for Jewish genocide and incitement to hatred. And it continued after the election, into the fall of 2009—on the official Web site of the man who supposedly is the leader of the free world, and who has editorial control over the Web site.

The site was and is policed closely. It now cautions, “Content posted on our Website by our users is not guaranteed by us as to accuracy, completeness, or usefulness, and we do not endorse any content posted by our users.” However, the Web site operators say that they “reserve the right, in our sole discretion,” to “discontinue, change, improve or correct” material on the site.
⁵⁴

On what basis would they make such judgments? During the campaign, the site moderators said that they removed material they considered to be “disrespectful to our other users” and to “detract from a welcoming community where all people can engage in positive discourse.”
⁵⁵

What they found disrespectful and removed, and what they allowed to stay on the site, were interesting. Once during the campaign a conservative blogger, Bill Levinson, posted a blog on Obama’s Web site consisting entirely of a series of quotations from Obama’s own book,
Dreams from My Father
. Obama’s people did not approve of their standard-bearer’s words, so Levinson’s blog and account were deleted from the Obama site in less than forty-eight hours.
⁵⁶

That’s right: Barack Obama’s Web site banned Obama’s own words.

But the most disgusting anti-Semitic ravings remained on the
site—along with blogs advocating anarchy and the overthrow of the United States Congress.

In April 2008 a post appeared claiming that “Jews owe Africa and Africans everything they have today because if Africa did not shelter them when they were homeless and starving, they would not be here today.”
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When such things went up on Obama’s Web site (and often stayed there for long periods), the Jewish lay leadership in this country said nothing, did nothing, and supported this man. When he became president of the United States, there was even more ugly Jew hatred and incitement to kill Jews on Obama’s Web site.

It harked back to Jewish blood libels. Obama’s Web site became a hub for Islamic anti-Semitism.

On October 5, 2009, a post went up on Obama’s Web site entitled “Nazi Israel… Indeed.” It quoted a Princeton professor, Richard Falk, referring to Israel’s “war crimes,” “genocidal tendencies,” “holocaust implications,” and “holocaust-in-the-making.” It spoke about Israel’s “Nazi-like crimes and human rights violation.”

It claimed: “Comparing the present-day Israel with Nazi Germany one discovers that the majority of the Israeli policies are the exact copies of the Nazi policies. Nazi Germany had invaded its European neighbors extending from England to Russia. Israel had also invaded all its neighboring countries: Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon. It is also heavily involved in the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan. Its tentacles had also reached African countries as far as South Africa, Somalia, Sudan, Angola, and Sierra Leone.”

Continuing the lies and blood libels, the post also asserted: “Worse than the Nazis Israeli forces used to invade peaceful Palestinian towns, execute men, women and children in cold blood everywhere and anywhere they encounter them, dynamite their homes on top of their residents, and finally demolish the whole town making room for new
Israeli colonies.” It charged that Israel pursued “a pre-meditated genocidal plan” against the Palestinian Arabs.
⁵⁸

Suffice to say that this entry passed muster with Obama’s moderators and was clearly acceptable to Obama for America: it was not taken down.

There appeared to be a campaign of sorts to normalize this hatred, as if it were not so bad. Otherwise, why did this poison go up and stay up at Obama’s Web site under his name for months? Why didn’t Obama stop the terrible hate speech he was hosting on his site?

He must have known that anti-Semites were posting these blood libels on his Web site. So why did he retain the platform as president of the United States?

Why did he encourage it with his silence? By creating an Obama-sanctioned forum that continued to be updated and maintained after his election, a state-sanctioned Web site for such incitement to hate, Obama gave his silent assent to those sentiments.

It is increasingly clear that the Islamic anti-Semitism taught in the Qur’anic classes of Obama’s youth in Indonesia and the subsequent adult years he spent with the likes of demagogues and Jew haters like Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayers, and Louis Farrakhan have made him the man he is.

One Israeli intelligence official summed up Obama’s policy toward his country in a nutshell: “Obama wants to make friends with our worst enemies and until now the worst enemies of the United States. Under this policy, we are more than irrelevant. We have become an obstacle.”
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An obstacle… but to what goal?

THE OBAMA POLICY TOWARD ISRAEL
SEEMED TO PROCEED FROM THE ASSUMPTION
THAT THE RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE CONFLICT BETWEEN
Israel and the Palestinians lay entirely with Israel. It was only three weeks after Barack Hussein Obama took office when Israeli pundit Caroline Glick noted that “since it came into office a month ago, every single Middle East policy the Obama administration has announced has been antithetical to Israel’s national security interests.” She listed them:

Glick could have added the 900 million dollars that the Obama administration announced in February 2009 that it would be giving to the Palestinians in Gaza in order to help them rebuild after the Israeli action in Gaza that winter. “None of the money will go to Hamas, it will be funneled through NGOs and U.N. groups,” an administration official insisted.
²

Reality was not so easy. This bestowal of American largesse came only weeks after the UN Relief and Works Agency announced that it was suspending aid to the Palestinians because Hamas kept hijacking the aid packages.
³
What safeguards did the United States put into place to make sure that this $900 million would not likewise find its way into Hamas coffers?

None.

Three months after Obama took office, his administration launched what Glick termed “its harshest onslaught against Israel to date.”
⁴
Obama’s national security adviser, Gen. James L. Jones, stated that “the new administration will convince Israel to compromise on the Palestinian question. We will not push Israel under the wheels of a bus, but we will be more forceful toward Israel than we have been under Bush.”
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“More forceful” in what way?

Glick reported that that same week, “acting on behalf of Obama,
Jordanian King Abdullah II urged the Arab League to update the so-called Arab peace plan from 2002. That plan, which calls for Israel to withdraw from Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria and the Golan Heights and accept millions of foreign Arabs as citizens as part of the so-called ‘right of return’ in exchange for ‘natural’ relations with the Arab world, has been rejected by successive Israeli governments as a diplomatic subterfuge whose goal is Israel’s destruction.”

How would the destruction of Israel result from this? “By accepting millions of so-called Palestinian refugees,” Glick explained, “Israel would effectively cease to be a Jewish state. By shrinking into the 1949 armistice lines, Israel would be unable to defend itself against foreign invasion. And since ‘natural relations’ is a meaningless term both in international legal discourse and in diplomatic discourse, Israel would have committed national suicide for nothing.”
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Also during the first week of May 2009, Assistant Secretary of State Rose Gottemoeller broke sharply from precedent by calling upon Israel to join the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty: “Universal adherence to the NPT itself, including by India, Israel, Pakistan and North Korea,” she asserted, “remains a fundamental objective of the United States.”
⁷

The Obama administration had made history. This was the first open acknowledgment by a U.S. official that Israel had nuclear weapons at all. Israel itself had never confirmed that it had any, and its American ally had always recognized that to disclose the full nature and extent of Israeli armaments could seriously harm the Jewish state’s ability to defend itself against its neighbors.

Its American ally had always recognized this, that is, until the administration of Barack Hussein Obama.

SOUNDING LIKE A ZIONIST

Barack Hussein Obama had a disturbing track record from the beginning. He knew he couldn’t win with a background filled with Jew-haters and support for Palestinians. So he did what any politician does when faced with troublesome facts—he began a cover-up. He began an elaborate game of pretending that his positions were other than what they were.

When he began his campaign for president, Obama pursued the Jewish vote in earnest.

Suddenly, without warning, he started sounding like… a Zionist.

On January 22, 2008, as the jihad terrorist group Hamas in Gaza was raining rockets upon schools, homes, and residential areas in southern Israel, Senator Barack Obama began to position himself as a defender of Israel. He wrote this to Zalmay Khalilzad, the permanent U.S. representative to the United Nations: