Oh, Oh, Obama! “I’m the closest thing to a Jew that has ever sat in this Office”
http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/2015/06/oh-oh-obama-im-closest-thing-to-jew.html
In The Atlantic recently, an in-depth interview by Jeffrey Goldberg with Barack Obama that begins:
‘On Tuesday afternoon, as President Obama was bringing an occasionally contentious but often illuminating hour-long conversation about the Middle East to an end, I brought up a persistent worry. “A majority of American Jews want to support the Iran deal,” I said, “but a lot of people are anxiety-ridden about this, as am I.” Like many Jews—and also, by the way, many non-Jews—I believe that it is prudent to keep nuclear weapons out of the hands of anti-Semitic regimes. Obama, who earlier in the discussion had explicitly labeled the supreme leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, an anti-Semite, responded with an argument I had not heard him make before.
“Look, 20 years from now, I’m still going to be around, God willing. If Iran has a nuclear weapon, it’s my name on this,” he said, referring to the apparently almost-finished nuclear agreement between Iran and a group of world powers led by the United States. “I think it’s fair to say that in addition to our profound national-security interests, I have a personal interest in locking this down.”….’
And now, in Foreign Policy magazine, a must-read interview by David Rothkopf with Jeffrey Goldberg, entitled “In Search of the Real Barack Obama.” in which Goldberg says, inter alia:
‘….. To put it crudely, the basic split on Obama is this: Is he destroying Israel, or is Israel destroying Israel? I go more with the latter than the former at the moment. If you believe the former, you despise him. If you believe the latter, you can’t quite believe that a) Israel’s government is carrying out policies that will eventually lead to the country’s dissolution, or wholesale isolation; and b) that more Israelis don’t understand that an African-American president who speaks feelingly about the moral necessity of Zionism is a friend, not a foe. But we can talk about that later.
On Iran, I was happy to hear him say he owns this process.
It’s on him, and the fact that [Obama] recognizes that he will be blamed, even as a 75-year-old, if Iran gets a bomb, is actually reassuring.
But I also worry that he is unrealistic about aspects of the Iran deal, for a number of reasons — the way they will spend their money, his belief that his negotiators are dealing with rational people — rational in the way that you and I think of rationality — and so on. On Gulf issues, the hardest swallow is that he appeared to be warning Saudi Arabia of the consequences associated with gearing-up its own nuclear program, but he’s attempting to strike a deal with Iran that allows it, in essence, to maintain the infrastructure of a nuclear program. In other words, an ally is being treated more harshly, in this one way, than an adversary. Of course, his answer to this is that Saudi Arabia has America behind it, so it doesn’t need a nuclear program. Still, the optics are strange, and the unhappiness of certain Arab leaders is understandable…..’
Meanwhile, according to the Daily Mail Obama’s former senior adviser Dan Axelrod has revealed that Obama claimed: “I’m the closest thing to a Jew that has ever sat in this office.”
Really? Despite this?
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