A former aide to New York State Governor George Pataki slammed the Obama administration’s treatment of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and the State of Israel in a prelude to Sunday’s “Break the Silence’ rally, set to begin at 1:00 p.m. (EDT) outside the Israeli Consulate in Manhattan.

The event will take place rain or shine, according to organizer Beth Gilinsky, head of the Jewish Action Alliance.

Among those on the podium will be Jeff Weisenfeld of Bernstein Global Wealth Management, a long-time leader in New York’s “mainstream” Jewish community who for years was also active in the National Committee for Jewish Education. Weisenfeld spent four years as chief of staff in the city administration of former Mayor Ed Koch, a Democrat before becoming an aide to Governor George Pataki, another Republican.

Speaking late Friday afternoon in an interview with Israel National News, Weisenfeld called the current diplomatic crisis “the biggest accidental or deliberate miscalculation in American-Israeli relations made by any American president.” He added that the Obama administration’s overtures to the Muslim world, and the contrast with its hostility to the State of Israel, had transformed the U.S. executive branch into a “complete Alice-in-Wonderland government. I don’t want to make light of it here,” Weisenfeld said with some sarcasm, “but it’s like Purim, when Mordechai becomes Haman, and Haman becomes Mordechai.”

He reserved special criticism for White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and Special Presidential Adviser David Axelrod, both traditonal Jews in the Obama administration who are among the president’s closest aides. “I had positions like theirs, I worked for a governor, a senator… I always made sure that I was representing the Jewish community to the governor, and the governor to them. But there are some who see their power as an end in itself. They don’t want to tell the boss when he’s wrong. And they are the worst kind of people to have in government,” Weisenfeld said.

“Islam has evolved backwards, has become more violent than perhaps it was even in its inception, since they did not have the weapons then, that they have today. And you have Emanuel and Axelrod, who have bad judgment, and who do not see the need to fight this moral equivalency.”

Weisenfeld also noted that most “mainstream” Jewish community organizations did not – and could not – officially sign on to sponsor Sunday’s rally for fear of retribution from the Obama administration. “The mainstream groups are about access and response to a direct threat from the White House.

“The [Jewish] Federations and their beneficiaries and subsidiaries have been warned by Rahm Emanuel to stay away from public criticism of the president on Israel. But unless the weather is horrendous,” he added, “there will be an abundance of “establishment-affiliated” people. Maybe we can wake up this president and pull him back from the abyss.” (IsraelNationalNews.com)