Obama discards his court Jews: Richard Baehr
http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=18011
When U.S. President Barack Obama announced his candidacy for president in 2007, he was just two years removed from having served as an undistinguished backbencher in the Illinois State Senate. Some people committed to the U.S.-Israel relationship took the time to explore Obama’s background in Illinois, and found a significant number of troubling things. One of the explorers was Ed Lasky in the American Thinker. Lasky’s article on Obama and Israel was widely (though quietly) circulated by the Hillary Clinton campaign in her ultimately unsuccessful effort against Obama to win the Democratic nomination in 2008. Clinton believed that policy toward Israel was a major differentiating factor between herself and Obama, and in the primaries, Clinton won more votes than Obama among Jewish Democrats.
Another writer who came to explore Obama’s history on Israel and the Palestinians was Stanley Kurtz, who arguedtwo years into Obama’s first term that Obama was indeed a man of the hard Left, particularly when it came to the Middle East struggle. It did not take a lot of digging to discover that Obama’s mentors on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict included the likes of Rashid Khalidi, Edward Said, radical activist Bill Ayers, his minister Reverend Jeremiah Wright and Electronic Intifada founder Ali Abunimah. In perhaps the most meaningful article on the subject, and one that was almost entirely ignored by the national media, Abunimah argued in “How Barack Obama Learned to Love Israel” that the once Palestinian-friendly Obama had tacked toward Israel so as to look like more of a mainstream candidate and help get himself elected as senator and then president (and to collect lots of campaign cash from pro-Israel liberal Jews for his election contests). To get some idea of how radical Obama’s long-time friend Abunimah is on the subject of Israel, he opposed the U.N. Security Council resolution passed on Friday for not being harsh enough in targeting Israel (no sanctions) and for condemning violence committed by those who are only exercising resistance against occupation.
In both of his races for president in 2008 and 2012, Obama won a large majority of the Jewish vote according to exit polls, though some Jewish voters seemed to have wised up, noticing during Obama’s first term that the president was a lot less than advertised in terms of support for the Jewish state. Among Jews, the gap between support for Obama and for his Republican opponent dropped from 56 to 39 percentage points.
On Friday, while vacationing in Hawaii, Obama observed his normal pattern of not being around to face the music when something controversial occurs, ordering his U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power to abstain on U.N. Security Council Resolution 2334, which targeted all Israeli activity, settlements and otherwise, beyond the 1949 armistice line, as a violation of international law. The measure also called for the nations of the world to take account of the dividing line, meaning of course that boycotts of Israeli products produced on the wrong side of the line, or by companies that produced products on both sides, were in order. Jews now living in the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem, where they have lived nearly continuously for the last 3,000 years, are apparently illegal settlers in the eyes of the United Nations and Barack Obama.
While the resolution was passed under Chapter 6 of the U.N. charter, and not Chapter 7 (which can include specific sanctions or other actions by the U.N. or its member states), it is likely that Israel will not be a stranger at the International Criminal court in the years ahead, and Israel-hating citizens of European countries and other places as well will make their own clumsy attempts at citizens arrests for those who have or are currently seen as violating the resolution.
The one thing that is certain is that the passage of the resolution will not change Israeli policy on settlements and will not lead to renewed peace talks. It will not enhance chances for the ever-elusive two-state solution, for those naive enough to think that this is what the Palestinians seek, when their entire history in the last century has had a different goal — first to prevent and then to destroy the Jewish state. And then there is the fact that Trump will take office in four weeks, meaning that the most anti-Israel president in American history will be replaced by what is setting up to be the most pro-Israel White House we have yet seen. Strong pushback against the U.N. action is to be expected.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused the Obama administration of colluding in the planning, drafting and passage of the resolution. The charges, while denied by the likes of U.S. Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes and U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, are true, and easily proven so. Vice President Joe Biden, another of the “great Democratic friends of Israel,” reportedly called the president of Ukraine to make sure that the nonpermanent member of the Security Council was on board to vote yes. It was important for the administration to try to argue that the U.S. is the most balanced country on the Security Council, since it only abstained while others voted yes. To have Ukraine appear to be more in Israel’s camp than America could not be allowed. Why did Kerry visit New Zealand two weeks ago? The Kiwis were one of the countries that revived the Security Council measure after Egypt withdrew it. What were the Palestinians discussing with the administration over the last week at the White House? The upcoming holidays?
A fair number of prominent Democrats in Congress contacted the White House urging a veto, or condemned the American abstention after the fact. This should be no great surprise. The Democrats have become a party that is very strong on the West Coast and in the Northeast U.S., and damaged goods everywhere else. In 2018, 25 of 33 senators standing for re-election are Democrats,10 of them in states won by Trump. Naturally, endangered senators will seek the American Israel Public Affairs Committee stamp of approval as pro-Israel members, much as Obama participated in this charade in 2004 and 2008 and 2012.
Lest we forget, Democrats had a chance to show some independence from the White House on a critical issue regarding Israel, namely the Iran nuclear deal, or as it might be called, “the allow Iran to get the bomb in a few years, remove sanctions and give them a hundred billion dollars” agreement. And how did the supposedly pro-Israel Democrats do on the Iran nuclear agreement? Some 25 Democratic House members (out of 188), and four Democratic Senators (out of 46) broke with their president. In the Senate, Democrats were such complete cowards that they upheld a filibuster so that no Democrat would need to officially have a recorded vote on the matter. On the other hand, more Democratic senators (eight) and House members (more than 50) chose to boycott Netanyahu’s speech to a joint session of Congress, explaining why Israel opposed the deal and why it was a threat to the Jewish state, other countries in the region and the United States. Such allegedly pro-Israel giants as Virginia Senator Tim Kaine, the vice presidential nominee for the Democrats this year, thought boycotting Netanyahu was an appropriate action, consistent I guess with all his previous such boycotts, of which there are none to be found. One might wonder about how Kaine feels about attempts to prevent pro-Israel speakers from appearing on campuses in Virginia, or the BDS movement in general.
Of course, Obama always had his enablers in the organized Jewish community and among the leading pro-Israel groups who vouched for him and trashed his critics. Now, Obama has had his lackeys stick the knife into Israel while he is swimming and golfing in Hawaii. He has no more elections in which he needs to present a fake pro-Israeli veneer, and his anointed successor went down to defeat at the hands of Trump, of all people. His legacy is a crumbling mess — from Obamacare, through the courts overturning his executive actions and those of his rogue agencies, to half a million dead and half the population displaced in Syria (Obama’s Rwanda) to the Iran deal, probably the worst giveaway in American diplomatic history. But in the end, with nothing at stake politically for him any longer, he “fell out of love with Israel,” and demonstrated where his heart was all along.
Now that this is off his chest, do not expect Obama to simply ignore this issue after he leaves the White House. Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter is going to get some competition in the ex-presidents’ Israel-trashing business.
Richard Baehr is the co-founder and chief political correspondent for the American Thinker and a fellow at the Jewish Policy Cente
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