Post-American Presidency (16 page)

Those of us, like me, who had been studying him for years were taken aback. Others were pleasantly surprised. He was standing up for Israel’s right to defend itself just months after claiming that “nobody is
suffering more than the Palestinian people.”
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Many people, especially on the Far Left, didn’t like the bright young senator’s shift one bit.
Mother Jones
huffed that Obama’s endorsement of Israeli self-defense was “an object lesson in the intense pressure under which presidential candidates stake out ground on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the extraordinary effectiveness of the self-styled ‘pro-Israel’ movement.”
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But Barack Hussein Obama kept moving toward Israel.

On June 4, 2008, in a major address to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), he called himself a “true friend of Israel.” He warned his audience not to take seriously mass e-mails that were circulating warning American Jews that he was just the opposite. He spoke of his “strong commitment to make sure that the bond between the United States and Israel is unbreakable today, tomorrow and forever.”

Obama decried the existence of “terrorist groups and political leaders committed to Israel’s destruction,” and “maps across the Middle East that don’t even acknowledge Israel’s existence, and government-funded textbooks filled with hatred toward Jews.” He lamented the “rockets raining down on Sderot” and the fact that “Israeli children have to take a deep breath and summon uncommon courage every time they board a bus or walk to school.”

Obama even claimed—with a straight face—to have been a proud “part of a strong, bipartisan consensus that has stood by Israel in the face of all threats,” and stated disapprovingly: “I don’t think any of us can be satisfied that America’s recent foreign policy has made Israel more secure.” He denounced Hamas, Hizbullah, and Iran, saying that the latter “always posed a greater threat to Israel than Iraq.” He shed crocodile tears over “the heavy burdens borne by the Israeli people.” Obama even criticized “those who would lay all of the problems of the Middle East at the doorstep of Israel and its supporters, as if the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the root of all trouble in the region” and those who “blame the Middle East’s only democracy for the region’s extremism.”

Spoken like a real mensch!

Americans are, by and large, big supporters of Israel. They thought Obama was, too. His shift in stance gave many people that impression. Barack Hussein Obama made a solemn promise: “Our alliance is based on shared interests and shared values. Those who threaten Israel threaten us. Israel has always faced these threats on the front lines. And I will bring to the White House an unshakeable commitment to Israel’s security.” He declared that as president he would ensure “Israel’s qualitative military advantage” and its ability to “defend itself from any threat—from Gaza to Tehran.” He said that he would “always stand up for Israel’s right to defend itself in the United Nations and around the world.”

What about the Palestinians? He didn’t entirely abandon his old friends. He called for a two-state solution, but even then Obama said: “We must isolate Hamas unless and until they renounce terrorism, recognize Israel’s right to exist, and abide by past agreements. There is no room at the negotiating table for terrorist organizations.” He warned that “the Palestinian people must understand that progress will not come through the false prophets of extremism or the corrupt use of foreign aid.”

The expertness of Obama’s performance raised questions about his inconsistency and disingenuousness.

And when he offered explanations, he usually just made matters worse. After all, when he spoke at AIPAC in 2007, he made “a clear and strong commitment to the security of Israel: our strongest ally in the region and its only established democracy.”
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I was there. The Jews at AIPAC gave him rock-star treatment. They couldn’t get enough of him. They loved him. Kissed his ring.
He was swarmed by well-wishers. Yet only nine days later, he made his infamous claim that “nobody is suffering more than the Palestinian people.”
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When confronted about this odd and incendiary remark, Obama offered an unconvincing explanation: “Well, keep in mind what the remark actually, if you had the whole thing, said. And what I said is nobody has suffered more than the Palestinian people from the failure of the Palestinian leadership to recognize Israel, to renounce violence, and to get serious about negotiating peace and security for the region.”

But actually, Thomas Beaumont of
The Des Moines Register
reported on March 12, 2007, that Obama attributed the allegedly unique suffering of the Palestinian people to the “stalled peace efforts with Israel,” and said nothing about failures of the Palestinian leadership or violence on the part of the Palestinians.
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No one, no matter how nimble minded, can explain away such duplicity.

And even in the midst of all his pro-Israel statements of 2008, there were warning signs. The Rev. Jesse Jackson (who described his relationship with Obama as that of “a neighbor or, better still, a member of the family”) said forthrightly in October 2008, as Obama appeared poised for victory, that the “Zionists who have controlled American policy for decades” would find that control loosening. “Obama is about change,” Jackson asserted. “And the change that Obama promises is not limited to what we do in America itself. It is a change of the way America looks at the world and its place in it.”

But most Americans who supported Israel paid no heed. Nor did they stir when Obama himself, while proclaiming that “Israel’s security is sacrosanct” and “non-negotiable,” in practically that same breath declared that “the Palestinians need a state that is contiguous and cohesive.” Contiguous? A contiguous Palestinian state comprising both Gaza and Judea and Samaria (“the West Bank”) would
necessitate either a noncontiguous, bisected Israel, or a severely reduced Jewish state. Yet at the same time Obama also promised that Jerusalem would “remain the capital of Israel,” and would “remain undivided.”

It would take a Solomon—or maybe a Suleiman the Magnificent—to make sense of all of Obama’s contradictory recommendations.

Yet above all, despite expounding upon his desire to negotiate with Iran, Barack Obama promised: “I will always keep the threat of military action on the table to defend our security and our ally Israel.”
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High-sounding words, and most Jews believed those words. Jewish comedienne Sarah Silverman expressed the prevailing tendency among American Jews to keep their heads firmly in the sand in September 2008 when she exhorted Jews to make “the Great Schlep” to visit their grandparents and urge them to vote for Obama: “If Barack Obama does not become the next president of the United States,” she declared, “I’m going to blame the Jews.” She asserted that “Barack Obama’s foreign policy is much more stabilizing than John McCain’s, and much better for Israel.”
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On what did she base that claim? Wishful thinking.

I traveled to South Florida days before the election to debunk the mythology of the Obama brand and Silverman’s demands that Jewish grandchildren bully bubbe and zayde into voting for Obama, but it was for naught. Video clips of Sarah’s rant and my Florida trek are still available on YouTube for viewing. Watch them. It’s an eye-opener. But alas, the spell was not broken—no thanks to a media completely and utterly in the tank for this mysterious, charismatic chameleon. The spell ultimately got shattered, but not until after the election. Seventy-eight percent of American Jews voted for Barack Hussein Obama to become president. And once he became president, that’s all they had: words. As a famous Jew, Jesus of Nazareth, once said, it is not by words, but “by their fruits you shall know them.”

And so we know him.

For despite everything he said at AIPAC, when Barack Obama became president of the United States, he began a relentlessly anti-Israel course, treating America’s foremost ally in the Middle East like an enemy, and its enemies—including jihad-enabling terror states such as Syria—like allies.

COZYING UP TO HAMAS

For all the Jews who voted for him, Barack Hussein Obama had an inauguration present: he selected the leader of a group that had been named an unindicted coconspirator in a Hamas terror funding case to present a prayer during his inauguration festivities. Ingrid Mattson, president of ISNA, offered a prayer at the National Cathedral during inaugural festivities on January 20, 2009.

Superficially, Obama’s choice was understandable: Ingrid Mattson was a Canadian convert to Islam who carefully cultivated the image of a moderate spokesperson. Yet her organization’s record is far from clean. Federal prosecutors in summer 2008 rejected claims that ISNA was unfairly named an unindicted coconspirator in the Holy Land Foundation terror funding case.
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ISNA has even admitted prior ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas.
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The Muslim Brotherhood is an international Islamic organization dedicated to establishing the rule of Islamic law everywhere on earth. Hamas identified itself in its charter as “one of the wings of Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine.” The charter also quotes the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan Al-Banna: “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it.”
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The Brotherhood has designs on the United States, too. In a memorandum on the Muslim Brotherhood’s strategy in the United States, a
Muslim Brotherhood operative named ISNA as an allied organization in what it called “a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.”
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Mattson has also tried to set Jews and Christians against one another. Speaking at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government in March 2007, Mattson said: “Right-wing Christians are very risky allies for American Jews, because they [the Christians] are really anti-Semitic. They do not like Jews.”
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Neither Obama nor the media ever asked Mattson to explain ISNA’s ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas.

And so she prayed for Barack Hussein Obama on January 20, 2009. After that, Valerie Jarrett, Obama’s senior advisor for public engagement and international affairs and a longtime, close Obama aide, asked Mattson to join the White House Council on Women and Girls, which is dedicated to “advancing women’s leadership in all communities and sectors—up to the U.S. presidency—by filling the leadership pipeline with a richly diverse, critical mass of women.”
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A hijab-wearing leader of a group with ties to terrorists and Islamic supremacists—that’s diverse, all right!

But prayers and largely symbolic appointments were the least of Israel’s worries. When Obama became president, he began to act, and to show his true colors.

MAKING FRIENDS WITH A STATE
SPONSOR OF TERRORISM

One of Israel’s chief enemies is, of course, Syria. It partners with Iran in aiding the terror group Hizbullah that likewise is determined to wipe Israel off the map. Syria has given assistance to Al-Qaeda in Iraq;
today, it is building a nuclear reactor on the sly—with North Korean assistance. Israel bombed the site of a suspected Syrian nuclear reactor in September 2007. Many suspected even then that the reactor bombed by the IDF was not the only nuclear activity going on in Syria. Still smarting over its loss of the Golan Heights in the Six-Day War of 1967, Syria plays host to jihad terror organizations and individuals that have vowed to destroy Israel.

The U.S. State Department named Syria a State Sponsor of Terrorism on December 29, 1979. Syria has been on that list ever since—the longest tenure of any of the world’s rogue states. Cuba didn’t make the list until 1982; Iran was added in 1984; and Sudan in 1993. This designation results, according to the State Department Web site, in “restrictions on U.S. foreign assistance; a ban on defense exports and sales; certain controls over exports of dual use items; and miscellaneous financial and other restrictions.”
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The designation was richly deserved. Damascus is a cosmopolitan hub of the global Islamic jihad, and has been the site of numerous summit meetings between jihadist leaders. Hassan Nasrallah of the terrorist group Hizbullah met there in July 2007 with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran.
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The terrorist group Hamas maintains an office in Damascus, and Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal met there in early 2009 with Ali Larijani, the speaker of the Iranian parliament and one of the most powerful politicians in the Islamic Republic of Iran.
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The United States has taken Syria to task for supporting jihad terror groups including Hizbullah and Hamas. And in February 2005, the Bush administration recalled its ambassador from Damascus as an expression of “profound outrage” over the murder of the prime minister of Lebanon, Rafik Hariri, an opponent of Syria.
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Within weeks of taking office, Obama announced plans to ease sanctions that had been put into place against Syria because of its
involvement in enabling the global jihad. “The Obama administration,” reported the
World Tribune
, “was expected to suspend U.S. sanctions on Syria’s military and energy programs.”
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On June 24, 2009, he announced that he was returning an American ambassador to Damascus. “This strongly reflects the administration’s recognition of the role Syria plays,” explained White House press secretary Robert Gibbs, “and the hope of the role that the Syrian government can play constructively to promote peace and stability in the region.”
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What had Syria done to convince Obama that it could play a constructive role “to promote peace and stability in the region”?

Nothing.