RUTHIE BLUM: HEAVEN HELP HUMANITY
http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=8335
Heaven help humanity
On Wednesday, U.S. President Barack Obama received an “Ambassador for Humanity” award from movie director Steven Spielberg, the founder of the University of Southern California Shoah Foundation.
“Standing up to anti-Semitism is not simply about protecting one community or one religious group,” Obama said in his acceptance speech at the gala, which was held in honor of the 20th anniversary of the Holocaust museum that Spielberg established after making the film “Schindler’s List.”
The president also urged Americans to “speak out against the rhetoric that threatens the existence of the Jewish homeland,” and assured that he would “sustain America’s unshakable commitment to Israel’s security.”
Due to Obama’s appalling treatment of Israel in particular and his disastrous foreign policy in general — both of which have empowered human-rights abusers across the globe — these words ring as hollow as the distinction bestowed upon him by Spielberg.
As a result, conservative pundits have been justifiably taking him to task for his hypocrisy. Obama, after all, is the president on whose watch the Iranian regime is racing towards a nuclear bomb; the Syrian dictator is massacring his people in the tens of thousands with every means available, including chemical weapons; the Turkish prime minister has come out of the Islamist closet to side with forces hostile to the United States and Israel; the Russian president has invaded Ukraine; and the Palestinian Authority is burying the hatchet with Hamas, instead of negotiating its false claims to and ostensible desire for statehood.
These are the most blatant, but by no means the only, results of Obama’s agenda of reaching out to America’s enemies and admitted pride in “leading from behind.” Indeed, they are the fruits of his hard labor, not the blunders of a novice.
Still, there is one key outcome he did not anticipate when handed the Oval Office on a silver platter: that his many years of education at the hands of mentors like radical community organizer Saul Alinsky and Black Liberation theologist Pastor Jeremiah Wright have had the opposite of his intended effect. They did not culminate in the socialist multicultural world-without-borders of his fantasies.
On the contrary, in the world as it actually exists, a weakling in the White House provided a green light for an escalation in sectarian, feudal, religious and — yes — even border wars. Rather than winning brownie points for kowtowing to despots large and small, Obama has earned their utter disdain.
His response has been to attack anyone who dares point this out. It is thus that he considers the Republican Party a greater threat than the Republican Guards.
And then, of course, there’s Israel.
Leaving aside the debate about whether statements emanating from his administration constitute anti-Semitism, there is no question that Obama has as dim a view of Israel as he does of the U.S., and has been doing everything in his power to undermine the fabric of both. As the man at the helm of the latter, he has been doing such a stellar job that it could take decades to repair the damage.
Where the former is concerned, however, he has not fared so well. If anything, his behavior towards Israel has increased Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s popularity at home.
This is because what Obama does is actually worse than expressing the kind of outright hatred for the Jewish state that Iranian mullahs and their terrorist proxies boast. He is among the ever-widening circle of leftists, among them the J Street crowd, who profess their undying love for Israel, while placing it on a par with the world’s most pernicious elements.
The danger of this trend, which I have called “anti-Israel is the new pro-Israel,” lies in its disingenuousness. Where such a fashion reigns, any moral parity made between Israel and the PA constitutes giving Israel the benefit of the doubt. The Obama administration excels at this underhanded game of proving its good intentions by treating “both sides” — one a democracy striving for peace, and the other a corrupt, lawless entity dreaming of jihad — as equals.
This is precisely what enables Obama to continue to enjoy the political support and financial backing of American Jews for whom Israel is a voting issue. Indeed, Obama’s “pro-Israel” speech to Hollywood A-listers at Spielberg’s gala coincided with a massive fundraising campaign among rich Jews ahead of the midterm elections in November.
As a newly crowned “Ambassador for Humanity” — an apt title for someone who makes no distinction between one species of humanity and another — Obama will undoubtedly bring back some big bucks for his party comrades running for Congress.
Heaven help humanity if they win.
Ruthie Blum is the author of “To Hell in a Handbasket: Carter, Obama, and the ‘Arab Spring.'”
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