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The meaning of the phrase “preaching to the converted” is seemingly often lost on partisan audiences who may be told what they want to hear when a political candidate is making promises to them.
When Barack Obama recently told an audience at the AIPAC conference in Washington that Jerusalem would remain the capital of Israel, and that it must remain undivided, his words were widely believed to be genuine... that is, until he qualified and seemingly retracted them a day later in response to criticism from Mahmoud Abbas and Hamas. Quite predictably, after such a sequence of statement and retraction, the meaning of Barack Obama’s original words remains in doubt. All Jews who are concerned about the fate of Jerusalem quite logically are now clamoring to determine exactly what he meant in his words to the AIPAC conference.
So how do we decipher the sincerity of Barack Obama with regard to his policy toward Israel? The first thing we should realize is that the Obama team would have had to be hopelessly naive to think that there would be no Arab fallout from the comments that the presidential candidate made to the AIPAC conference. Hence, the Obama team was probably prepared to make some form of retraction to what was said at the conference. But one way to understand what Obama fully meant by his comments is to analyze the substance of his retraction—but even here, the meaning is highly ambiguous.
In an interview with CNN the day after the AIPAC conference, Obama merely said, “Well, obviously it’s going to be up to the parties to negotiate a range of these issues. And Jerusalem will be part of those negotiations.” He also said that “As a practical matter, it would be very difficult to execute [a division of the city]. And I think that it is smart for us to work through a system in which everybody has access to the extraordinary religious sites in Old Jerusalem but that Israel has a legitimate claim on that city.” However, in a slightly different take, one of his advisors told the Jerusalem Post that what Obama meant by an undivided Jerusalem was that “Jerusalem remains Israel’s capital and it’s not going to be divided by barbed wire and checkpoints as it was in 1948–1967.”
One could reasonably conclude from Obama’s comments to CNN that he was merely appeasing Arab sentiment by simply reiterating the current state of affairs and referring to the discussions that are being held between the Olmert government and the Palestinians with U.S. approval and oversight. The comment that his advisor made to the Jerusalem Post, however, about the city not being divided by barbed wire like it was in ’48 is slightly more troubling. This would mean that Barack Obama did not necessarily mean that the entire city should remain in Jewish hands.
If he meant that the door should remain open to Arab sovereignty over parts of Jerusalem, he should have not misled the 7,000-plus attendees at the AIPAC conference by stating otherwise. As Morton Klein, president of the Zionist Organization of America—who referred to Obama’s words as “troubling”—said, “It means he used the term [‘undivided’] inappropriately, possibly to mislead strong supporters of Israel that he supports something he doesn’t really believe.”
As one savvy Internet commentator put it, “Either Obama realized what his ‘Jerusalem’ remark to AIPAC meant, or he did not. If the latter, this displays appalling ignorance of one of the flashpoint issues in the conflict between Orient and Occident. I assume Obama cannot possibly be this ignorant. So it’s the former—blatant pandering to one of the most notorious of all the PACS, politics as usual.”
Still, when a candidate overwhelmingly endorses a unified Jerusalem as the capital of Israel before such a large audience of important personages, it has a tendency to dampen healthy skepticism about a candidate even amongst the non-naive and the politically savvy. For example, last Saturday night on the Dov Hikind Show, Assemblyman Dov Hikind began his program, during which he interviewed Caroline Glick, deputy managing editor of the Jerusalem Post, by openly admitting certain confusion on his part about what message the Obama campaign was really trying to convey to Jewish voters.
When asked by Assemblyman Hikind at the end of the interview about what she thought Obama meant by his comments with regard to Jerusalem, Ms. Glick, who in 2003 as a reporter was embedded with U.S. troops in Iraq, was typically forthright and blunt in her answer. She stated that Barack Obama was not sincere about anything he said, even going back to the excuses he made for remaining committed to his anti-Israel pastor Jeremiah Wright, and that there is therefore no valid reason why the comments he made to the AIPAC conference should be taken seriously, either.
This bold truth enunciated by Caroline Glick from the Holy Land seemed to leave the usually savvy and insightful assemblyman from Boro Park stunned, and it awakened him to the strong likelihood that Barack Obama was probably pandering to a Jewish audience when he made his comments to the AIPAC conference. If such a non-cynical politician such as Dov Hikind could be influenced by such bold pandering by a presidential candidate, one indeed shudders to think how easily duped the general population of Jewish voters can become—especially by someone with the superior oratorical skills of Barack Obama.
After she answered Hikind’s question about Barack Obama, Ms. Glick then enunciated exactly the same sentiment expressed a week earlier by Rabbi Joshua Balkany on the Zev Brenner Show, saying that any Jew who votes for Obama is “out of their minds.”
Even if one disregards the attempted clarification made to the Jerusalem Post by Obama’s advisor as an awkward attempt at Arab appeasement and not what Barack Obama himself really desires for Jerusalem, there are more troubling statements of appeasement in the candidate’s background which cast a shadow of doubt over his sincerity toward maintaining Jerusalem for the Jewish People.
As news editor Ed Lasky notes, Barack Obama expresses his fundamental attitude toward the handling of terrorists, in the preface to his book Dreams from My Father: “I know, I have seen, the desperation and disorder of the powerless: how it twists the lives of children on the streets of Jakarta or Nairobi…how easily they slip into violence and despair. I know that the response of the powerful to this disorder—alternating as it does between a dull complacency and, when the disorder spills out of its proscribed confines, a steady unthinking application of force…of more sophisticated military hardware—is inadequate to the task.” As Mr. Lasky correctly notes, although this may sound like “boilerplate rhetoric” it is really “the theory of appeasement stated clearly and succinctly.”
Other incidents of Obama’s appeasement of terrorists include a statement he made during a trip to Iowa, where he said, “Nobody is suffering more than the Palestinian People.” Which ignored not only the Israelis who have been living with terror and murder for years, but also ignored the refugees from the genocide in Darfur or the daily terror the Iraqi citizens have been experiencing from Muslim terrorists.
In an interview he gave to the Chicago Jewish News in March 2004, prior to the U.S. Senate primary election, when asked about the Israeli security barrier, Obama replied: “The creation of a wall dividing the two nations is yet another example of the neglect of this administration in brokering peace.” Obama referred to the Arabs in Gaza and the West Bank as a “nation” quite prematurely and to the security fence as a “wall,” despite this characterization correctly applying to less than five percent of its total length. In addition, he seemed oblivious to the great benefit which this “wall” has provided in reducing terrorist incidents in Israel.
Barack Obama has also somewhat curiously recently criticized the continued U.S. involvement in Iraq as strengthening the hand of Iran in the region and thereby placing Israel in a more precarious position. One can legitimately question, however, how sincere Obama is when he talks about preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons and about his commitment to Israel’s security vis-à-vis Iran when he advocates talking with the Iranian dictator who has repeatedly advocated Israel’s destruction. Would Obama’s method of “neutralizing” Iran also include encouraging Israel to try to make peace with Syria and to give up the Golan, much to its detriment?
Even if one refuses to judge Barack Obama’s commitment to Israel on the basis of his many incriminatory associations and support networks (which include Jimmy Carter and billionaire George Soros, who has been donating to lobbyist groups designed to erode American support for Israel, as well as other anti-Israel critics such as Wesley Clark), the fact is that in the two years he has been in the Senate, he has already amassed a voting record that is to the left of Ted Kennedy, and a great deal of his most fervent support has come from the left wing of the Democratic party. Moreover, as a state senator in Illinois, Barack Obama took what some feel was a disquietingly soft approach on bills dealing with drugs, gangs, and gun-control issues, which could be seen as an indication that he will also take a soft approach when it comes to dealing with terrorists.
Despite the eloquent rhetoric that continuously emanates from Barack Obama, which includes stated intentions to go after Al Qaeda and pursue Bin Laden inside Pakistan, the comment that future Israeli prime minister hopeful Benjamin Netanyahu made in reference to Iran’s nuclear ambitions might be seen as also applicable to Barack Obama: If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and acts like a duck, it is certainly not a railroad station.
Lawrence Kulak is a freelance writer and an attorney. He can be reached at craniumcrust@yahoo.com. ♦
1 - Posted on 6/19/2008 11:47:04 AM
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bush has let his gal pal condi the machesheyfa rice sell Israel up the river. she has completely sold out on us. she is the worst thing that could have happened from bush's reelection. why do we let her have a free pass?
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