John Podhertz on Obama's Animosity Towards Israel

Right on the mark:

Obama’s open hostility toward Netanyahu and his disproportionate reaction to the unintentional slight delivered to Biden are important, and deadly serious, because there is no doubt they were authentic expressions of real emotion. We’ve seen Obama be a little churlish and somewhat peevish, but rarely more openly negative than that. Nothing in the course of his presidency has made him angry, so far as we know, in the way that Israel and Netanyahu have made him angry. Not Iran’s defiance and game-playing. Not the supposed chicanery of Wall Street and the monstrous insurance companies that have served as his populist targets. Not even Rush Limbaugh.

This is meaningful. It suggests not merely that Obama differs with Israel on matters of policy but also that he takes these differences personally. And that, in turn, demonstrates there is an animus at work here, a predisposition to think badly of Israel—to view the Jewish state at best as an impediment to the good working order of a fairer world and at worst as a sower of discord. This is a bitter truth, but it is a truth, no matter how many Jews Obama knows or likes or employs, no matter how many Potemkin Passover seders he stages in the people’s house in which he is a temporary resident and in which he chose to treat a friend he ought to cherish instead like an enemy he cannot abide.