Obama and the Jews
I read an interesting pair of articles today — bookends, if you will — that discuss Obama’s increasingly tortured relationship with American Jews.
The first, by Sabrina Leigh Schaeffer, notes two things: first, Obama’s Israel-friendly rhetoric and, second, his numerous associations with people who are openly antisemitic and actively hostile to Israel. What thinking people have realized is that, because he has no Senate record to speak of, his rhetoric is just that — talk. However, his associations are actions. These are the people with whom he has chosen to spend time, from whom he has sought advice, and they represent the intellectual area in which he feels comfortable. From a Jewish perspective, they are not nice people:
While Reverend Wright’s anti-American and anti-Semitic ravings captured the attention of the public for weeks, it’s simply his theatrics that appear to make him the most repellant of Obama’s friends. The senator has tried to dismiss Wright as a “crazy uncle,” but if you take a closer look at the crowd the senator runs with, it appears he has a whole lot of crazy relatives to disinvite from dinner.
It was widely circulated that Wright supported — and even publicly commended — radical black Muslim leader Louis Farrakhan. Yet little has been said about Sen. Obama’s relationship with Rev. Michael Pfleger, a Catholic pastor at St. Sabina, also on the South Side of Chicago. In 2004, Obama told the Chicago Sun Times that Pfleger was one of his three spiritual mentors.
Pfleger’s name became more widely recognizable two years ago when Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich appointed a Farrakhan aide to serve on a hate-crimes commission. When the appointee, Sister Claudette, refused to denounce Farrakhan’s racist and anti-Semitic remarks, three Jewish members on the commission resigned — a situation that prompted Pfleger to respond, “good riddance.”
No less reprehensible than Reverends Wright and Pfleger is the Obama campaign’s national co-chairman, retired Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Merrill “Tony” McPeak, who has made numerous anti-Semitic and anti-Israel comments. While the general has a long blame-Israel-first record, the most repugnant remark came during a 2003 interview, when he blamed the Jewish-American community for the failure of the peace process between Israel and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.Despite calls on Senator Obama to remove McPeak as a key adviser, the general continues to serve on the campaign.
Obama’s support among radicals in the Palestinian community — and even from Ahmed Yousef of Hamas — has not gone unnoticed. In fact, in 2003 Obama helped honor Rashid Khalidi, a well-known critic of Israel and advocate of Palestinian rights, at a celebration where anti-Israel poetry was read and the United States was sharply criticized.
[snip]
Last month, another concerning relationship came to light between the Obamas and Hatem El-Hady, former chairman of the Toledo-based Islamic organization Kindhearts for Charitable Human Development — a group shut down in 2006 for raising money for Hamas. Until recently, El-Hady had a personal website on the official Obama campaign site and Michelle Obama was listed as one of El-Hady’s three “friends.”
What’s really impressive is that the above list is incomplete. It neglects others such as Robert Malley, Zbigniew Brzezinski and Samantha Power, to name just a few more off the top of my head. In other words, once you ignore what Obama is saying — and these words are not backed by any history or action — and start looking at what he’s doing, you see that he hangs with and seeks advice from people who are antisemitic and actively hostile to the only liberal democracy in the Middle East.
That was one article.
The second article was one in the New York Times and it’s very different. It’s entitled Many Florida Jews Express Doubts on Obama, and it makes clear that the problem isn’t Obama, it’s the Jews. The article talks about how many of the Jews won’t vote for him because he’s black, it talks about the silly rumors that some Jews raise, it talks about Obama’s nice speeches on Israel, and it glosses over Jeremiah Wright entirely. It mentions Jesse Jackson as an example of a black man who is antisemitic. However, the one thing the article assiduously ignores is Mr. Obama’s apparently compelling need to surround himself with people who hate Jews. While the article’s phrasing is friendly, folksie even, it is, in fact, a nasty swipe at Florida’s elderly Jewish community and a puff piece aimed at resurrecting Obama’s reputation with Jews who are seriously concerned about a man who talks the talk, but doesn’t walk the walk.
What the New York Times has written doesn’t come close to being journalism. It’s a mean little piece of propaganda aimed at deodorizing a nasty smell that just keeps wafting up from its chosen candidate.
