http://frontpagemag.com/2012/frontpagemag-com/alan-dershowitz-vs-david-solway-on-obama-and-israel/print/
Et Tu, Dershowitz?
By David Solway
A year and a half ago, I posted an article on this site expressing my skepticism of Alan Dershowitz’s insights into American politics and questioning his bias in favor of President Obama and the Democratic party. I wrote there: “when it comes to the international figure who may well be the most serious threat to Israel’s well-being and perhaps even to its survival—by whom I mean not Mahmoud Ahmadinejad but Barack Obama—Dershowitz’s pen tilts to the “sinister” side of the page as he no doubt meditates his still unwritten The Case for Obama.” I pointed out that Dershowitz does not so much as notice what National Post columnist George Jonas called “the malodorous miasma of gall, social engineering zeal, anti-Semitism and Arabist agenda that emanates from the Obama administration.” Mark Steyn probably said it best: “I suppose it’s conceivable that there are a few remaining suckers out there who still believe Barack Obama is the great post-partisan, fiscally responsible, pragmatic centrist he played so beguilingly just a year ago.”
True to form, Dershowitz has just published a column in The Jerusalem Post in which he declares his support for Obama as the president who is “best for America and for the world,” and, of course, for Israel. As a trained and practiced lawyer, he proceeds to marshal the evidence for his case. But as critical readers, we must see that the evidence is, to put it mildly, unpersuasive, if not disturbingly misleading.
Dershowitz argues that Obama is “a pragmatic, centrist liberal who has managed—with some necessary compromises—to bring us the first important healthcare legislation in recent history, appointed excellent justices to the Supreme Court, supported women’s rights, eliminated the “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” policy, maintained the wall of separation between church and state [and] kept up an effective war against terrorism.”
Well, let’s see. A “pragmatic, centrist liberal” is, by all reasonable counts, precisely what Obama is not. His record and his antecedents show beyond the slightest doubt that he is a far-left ideologue who wishes to “fundamentally transform” America into a redistributionist welfare state on the failing European model. The “excellent judges” he has appointed to the Supreme Court include Sonia Sotomayer (of “wise Latina” fame) and Elena Kagan, who did not recuse herself when voting for the Affordable Care Act, though she had “participated as ‘counselor or advisor’ of the law when she was solicitor general, and…is clearly not impartial about the fate of ObamaCare.” Obama’s support of women’s rights is arguable and many disapprove of the “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” policy, but we can leave these issues to debate and opinion. As for the separation of Church and State, the Catholic Church would surely not agree following the contraception flap. His “effective war against terrorism” consists of scrubbing terms like “Islam” and “jihad” from U.S. security documents and inviting the Muslim Brotherhood, in the person of Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi, to the White House. (The hunting down of Osama bin Laden was already in progress during the tenure of the previous administration.)
“President Obama has kept his promises,” Dershowitz avers. But Obama’s broken promises are legion, whether it is his promise to close Guantanamo, to reverse President Bush’s anti-terrorist policies, to establish “an unprecedented level of openness in Government,” to constrain the lobbying industry, to create five million more energy jobs and keep unemployment under 8 percent, to bring down health care premiums, to halve the deficit by the end of his first term (the 2013 budget envisions a deficit of more than $1 trillion)—the list is nigh endless.
