RUTHFULLY YOURS

If any of those who continue to believe that Barack Obama is anything other than a disaster for the defence of civilisation retain any functioning grey matter at all, this interview with Harvard clinical instructor in psychiatry and commentator on Israel Kenneth Levin provides a salutary antidote to such delusional mass hysteria. As he correctly observes, Obama is proving himself to be not just an enemy of Israel and America but also of those Muslims and other oppressed peoples around the world who are suffering and dying under tyranny:

Obama is seeking to mend fences primarily with America’s enemies in the Muslim world, and – to the degree that picking fights with Israel derives from this agenda – Israel is not the only victim. We’ve seen the Administration’s slowness to voice any support for those engaged in the popular uprising in Iran. The Iranian people are perhaps the most pro-American population of any Muslim country; but Obama has been seeking to engage the regime, and so he initially gave Muslim friends struggling for their freedom the back of his hand in order not to offend Iran’s theocrats. To some degree, he continues to do so.

Similarly, the genocide being perpetrated by the Sudanese government against the Muslims of Darfur continues virtually unabated. But Sudan, whose president won the support of the entire Arab League following his indictment for genocide by the International Criminal Court, is another enemy the Administration is seeking to placate, and so the Muslims of Darfur – despite Obama’s campaign promises to make their plight a priority for his presidency – are given short shrift.

The same pattern can be seen in the Administration’s actions vis-a-vis Honduras when its former president sought to subvert the nation’s democratic constitution in order to stay in power, in the manner of his friend Hugo Chaves’s subversion of Venezuela’s democracy. Honduras’s independent judiciary backed the constitution, refused to acquiesce in its violation and ordered that President Zelaya’s attempts at what was, in effect, a coup, be stopped. The Obama administration’s response was to back Zelaya and impose sanctions on this fellow democracy – apparently to win favor with Chavez and his circle of like-minded anti-American leaders in Central and South America who, of course, also sided with Zelaya and against Honduras’s democratic institutions.

If anything gives the lie to the belief by Obama’s supporters that they stand for ‘progressive’ values, this is surely it. They may have persuaded themselves that Jews have become Nazis; but aside from this rank bigotry, by supporting Obama they daily betray their most cherished causes on behalf of the wretched of the earth, for whom they shed such patent crocodile tears.