Obama and the ‘Amen Corner’ Elliott Abrams
http://www.weeklystandard.com/print/blogs/obama-and-amen-corner_1007346.html?nopager=1
With accusations of warmongering, the president feeds anti-Semitism.
This week President Obama sealed his legacy as the most divisive president in modern times, who will leave behind both worsened race relations and a set of arguments about Iran that will surely feed anti-Semitism.
That race relations have worsened under Obama is crystal clear, as even publications like The New York Times have acknowledged. A Times/CBS poll conducted in July revealed that “nearly six in 10 Americans, including heavy majorities of both whites and blacks, think race relations are generally bad, and that nearly four in 10 think the situation is getting worse. By comparison, two-thirds of Americans surveyed shortly after President Obama took office said they believed that race relations were generally good.” And Americans did link the downturn to the president: “almost half of those questioned said the Obama presidency had had no effect on bringing the races together, while about a third said it had driven them further apart.”
Think of that: a third of the American people, over a hundred million Americans, hold the president responsible for worsening race relations in the country. Why would that be? It’s reasonable to say the Mr. Obama’s close relationship with people who make a living from bitter race relations, such as Al Sharpton, plays a part. And so does Mr. Obama’s repeated insertion of himself into divisive racial situations even before the facts were fully known—starting with the famous case of the Harvard professor, Skip Gates, arrested in 2009.
But now, Mr. Obama is adding another item to this legacy of deeper divisions among Americans. The administration is scrambling to defend its Iran nuclear deal, which polls find is rejected by about a third of all Americans—the same number who support the deal. And the trend is downward: as people learn more, they are more skeptical.
The administration’s arguments on the merits are failing, so Mr. Obama has started arguing that the opposition comes from people who are in the pay of big donors, or who put Israel’s security first. This practice actually began in January, when the president met with all Democratic senators and discussed the Iran negotiations. According to The New York Times’s report, “The president said he understood the pressures that senators face from donors and others, but he urged the lawmakers to take the long view rather than make a move for short-term political gain.”
The statement would have been bad enough had the president referred only to “short term political gain.” By doing so he was saying critics of the coming Iran deal had no real principled objections and were simply playing politics with national security. It was vintage Obama: there’s no real debate here, just my principles and the dirty political motives of those who disagree.
But that’s not all he said, and “Donors and others” was a clear reference to opposition from AIPAC and the Jewish community. Lest anyone misunderstand, the president and his close supporters have been even clearer as the debate has gotten hotter.
The basic idea is simple: to oppose the president’s Iran deal means you want war with Iran, you’re an Israeli agent, you are in the pay of Jewish donors, and you are abandoning the best interests of the United States. So Dan Pfeiffer, senior political adviser to Obama until this winter, tweeted that Senator Charles Schumer—who announced his opposition to the Iran deal last week—should not be Democratic leader in the Senate because he “wants War with Iran.”
Obama himself set the overall tone in his speech last week at American University:
Between now and the congressional vote in September, you are going to hear a lot of arguments against this deal, backed by tens of millions of dollars in advertising. And if the rhetoric in these ads and the accompanying commentary sounds familiar, it should, for many of the same people who argued for the war in Iraq are now making the case against the Iran nuclear deal.
As to the criticism that the United States should have negotiated longer and harder and gotten a better deal, the president said, “Those making this argument are either ignorant of Iranian society, or they are not being straight with the American people.” Again: these are not principled disagreements, it’s just that the other side is ignorant and dishonest. And if that side wins, “Congressional rejection of this deal leaves…one option, another war in the Middle East.”
And then he gets to the nub of the argument: “Does anyone really doubt that the same voices now raised against this deal will be demanding that whoever is president bomb those nuclear facilities?”
Who are these people who will be “demanding” war? The “voices being raised against this deal” are those same big donors he mentioned back in January. And AIPAC. And the American Jewish Committee and the American Jewish Congress. And Jewish members of Congress like Chuck Schumer and Eliot Engel and Ted Deutch. And it’s not just that war would be inevitable, you see: it’s that those people would be demanding war, and are behind what he called “the drumbeat of war.”
Why would these people opposing the deal be doing that? It’s their “affinity for our friend and ally Israel.” But we have to resist their arguments: “as president of the United States it would be an abrogation of my constitutional duty to act against my best judgment simply because it causes temporary friction with a dear friend and ally.” It is implicit, and very close to explicit, here that the other side wants the U.S. president to act not on our own country’s behalf but on Israel’s. This is an echo of the old “dual loyalty” charge that has been lodged against American Jews since the day the State of Israel was established.
The president is not ignorant (the accusation he lays against his opponents) and must know he is here feeding a deep line of anti-Semitism that accuses of American Jews of getting America into wars. Of course this goes back the World War II and the accusations against Franklin Roosevelt, whose anti-Semitic critics called him “Rosenfeld;” the Internet is filled with such accusations. More recently, there was Pat Buchanan and his comments about the 1991 Gulf War: “There are only two groups that are beating the drums for war in The Middle East – the Israeli Defense Ministry and its amen corner in the United States.” Buchanan then called Capitol Hill “Israeli occupied territory.”
The same accusations were then made about the second Gulf War, in 2003: Jews, and especially Jewish “neocons,” dragged America into that war. In their infamous tract The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer wrote that as what to do about Saddam Hussein was debated “there was another variable in the equation, and the war would almost certainly not have occurred had it been absent. That element was the Israel lobby….” And that view is widely spread across the Internet as well, and is a staple of anti-Semitic sites and organizations.
And now Barack Obama joins the chorus—or shall we call it his own “amen corner.” His American University speech was an eloquent denunciation of those who disagree with him as warmongers with dual loyalty, who will be “demanding” war with Iran. This speech divides Americans not according to principled opinions, nor even by party, but mostly by religion. It shows disrespect for critics and lowers the tone of the important debate over Iran, but that is not its worst attribute. Once again, it shows Mr. Obama as the divider—willing to use arguments that may or may not help him win this summer’s argument but will surely leave an ugly mark on American politics.
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