Posted By Roger L Simon On October 30, 2014
I have never in my increasingly long life felt vulnerable as a Jew in America. I never even dreamed it would happen. But it has now — with the Obama administration.
Something is seriously wrong. At almost every opportunity, Obama and his minions have criticized Israel out of all proportion to the actions of the Jewish state, particularly during the recent Gaza War when there was a constant barrage of warnings from our State Department about harming civilians. (This is a criticism State would never turn on itself. Who knows how many innocents have died in the U.S. air attacks on ISIS — no one even says a word about it.)
Now they have called Israel’s prime minister a “chickensh*t,” a “coward” and who knows what else, using adjectives for Benjamin Netanyahu they don’t employ with Kim Jung-un, Vladimir Putin, Hassan Nasrallah, Bashar Assad or even the murderous Islamic State’s al-Baghdadi, not to mention — and this is probably crucial — the potentially most homicidal of all, Ayatollah Khamenei of the Islamic State of Iran. (One of the more sinister aspects of Jeff Goldberg’s article that generated this controversy was that one of his leakers bragged they had scared cowardly Netanyahu into not attacking Iran’s nuclear installations, as if this were a good thing, the implication being that the administration can now look good for making an Iran deal — that would ultimately give the mullahs the bomb.) It’s as if Netanyahu, not the aforementioned maniacs, were the administration’s worst enemy.
Meanwhile, the attempts to make nice to the Israelis over the vicious personal slurs from the article, which apparently came from two high and thus far unpunished administration officials, have been perfunctory, so perfunctory that you know they are not meant to be taken seriously, quite the contrary. In fact, an attempted terrorist assassination of a prominent American-Israeli in Jerusalem yesterday that caused the Israeli government to put the Temple Mount on lockdown has already generated more chastisement of the Israelis from our secretary of State. All this against an unprecedented, at least since World War II, rise in global anti-Semitism.
The administration claims to be making these “constructive” criticisms for Israel’s sake, but the Jewish state has better allies in Egypt and Saudi Arabia than they do in an Obama administration that seems to prefer Islamofascist Qatar — those same oil sheiks that bankroll Hamas, the terror organization whose charter exhorts all Muslims to kill every Jew hiding behind a tree anywhere in the world.
And you wonder why I feel like I’m living in Berlin in 1937.
Well, I do.
You will excuse me if I think my Jewish American friends that vote Democratic every year by rote are a bit sick. I have tried to have patience with them for about a decade, tried to persuade them with reason, but now I think they’re… well, there’s an excellent Yiddish word… ferkochta [1]. Or suffering from a Stockholm Syndrome so massive it wouldn’t fit in all the Volvo factories in Sweden.
Yes, I know many of those same people don’t give a sh*t, chicken or otherwise, about Israel — or if they do they are highly critical of everything about it, think it’s an apartheid state, yaddayaddayadda. (Don’t ask them to define apartheid, however.) I will just remind those same “progressive” people that there were plenty of German Jews who felt pretty much as they do back in, ahem, 1937.
If those “progressives” are of a Marxist tilt, I will further remind them that the man himself said, in The Eighteenth Brumaire, that history repeats, first as tragedy, then as farce. We’re now on the tragedy part.
Not that farce is, in this instance, so reassuring and not that I didn’t know in the first place. Indeed, I suspected this would happen all along, although that doesn’t make me the slightest bit happier. Attentive readers of this site will recall that I have on several occasions called upon the Los Angeles Times to release the Khalidi tape [2]. That’s a videotape held in the LAT’s vault of a going-away party for Rashid Khalidi, the University of Chicago professor who was on his way to Columbia to replace the vehemently anti-Zionest Edward Said as head of that university’s Middle East Studies department.
The party was reported to be quite an Israel bash, probably laced with some good-old fashioned Jew hatred. Rashid’s good friends the Obamas, Michelle and Barack, were in attendance. How much they agreed with the tenor of the evening we will never know, because the LAT refuses to release the tape. You would think the paper, given recent events and the decline in the Emperor’s popularity, might change its mind.
Fat chance. To do so would go against a narrative engrained in stone since at least 1968. They wouldn’t dare look inside that vault for fear they would have to act on what they might find. They are the real “chickensh*ts,” not Netanyahu.
Something is seriously wrong. At almost every opportunity, Obama and his minions have criticized Israel out of all proportion to the actions of the Jewish state, particularly during the recent Gaza War when there was a constant barrage of warnings from our State Department about harming civilians. (This is a criticism State would never turn on itself. Who knows how many innocents have died in the U.S. air attacks on ISIS — no one even says a word about it.)
Now they have called Israel’s prime minister a “chickensh*t,” a “coward” and who knows what else, using adjectives for Benjamin Netanyahu they don’t employ with Kim Jung-un, Vladimir Putin, Hassan Nasrallah, Bashar Assad or even the murderous Islamic State’s al-Baghdadi, not to mention — and this is probably crucial — the potentially most homicidal of all, Ayatollah Khamenei of the Islamic State of Iran. (One of the more sinister aspects of Jeff Goldberg’s article that generated this controversy was that one of his leakers bragged they had scared cowardly Netanyahu into not attacking Iran’s nuclear installations, as if this were a good thing, the implication being that the administration can now look good for making an Iran deal — that would ultimately give the mullahs the bomb.) It’s as if Netanyahu, not the aforementioned maniacs, were the administration’s worst enemy.
Meanwhile, the attempts to make nice to the Israelis over the vicious personal slurs from the article, which apparently came from two high and thus far unpunished administration officials, have been perfunctory, so perfunctory that you know they are not meant to be taken seriously, quite the contrary. In fact, an attempted terrorist assassination of a prominent American-Israeli in Jerusalem yesterday that caused the Israeli government to put the Temple Mount on lockdown has already generated more chastisement of the Israelis from our secretary of State. All this against an unprecedented, at least since World War II, rise in global anti-Semitism.
The administration claims to be making these “constructive” criticisms for Israel’s sake, but the Jewish state has better allies in Egypt and Saudi Arabia than they do in an Obama administration that seems to prefer Islamofascist Qatar — those same oil sheiks that bankroll Hamas, the terror organization whose charter exhorts all Muslims to kill every Jew hiding behind a tree anywhere in the world.
And you wonder why I feel like I’m living in Berlin in 1937.
Well, I do.
You will excuse me if I think my Jewish American friends that vote Democratic every year by rote are a bit sick. I have tried to have patience with them for about a decade, tried to persuade them with reason, but now I think they’re… well, there’s an excellent Yiddish word… ferkochta [1]. Or suffering from a Stockholm Syndrome so massive it wouldn’t fit in all the Volvo factories in Sweden.
Yes, I know many of those same people don’t give a sh*t, chicken or otherwise, about Israel — or if they do they are highly critical of everything about it, think it’s an apartheid state, yaddayaddayadda. (Don’t ask them to define apartheid, however.) I will just remind those same “progressive” people that there were plenty of German Jews who felt pretty much as they do back in, ahem, 1937.
If those “progressives” are of a Marxist tilt, I will further remind them that the man himself said, in The Eighteenth Brumaire, that history repeats, first as tragedy, then as farce. We’re now on the tragedy part.
Not that farce is, in this instance, so reassuring and not that I didn’t know in the first place. Indeed, I suspected this would happen all along, although that doesn’t make me the slightest bit happier. Attentive readers of this site will recall that I have on several occasions called upon the Los Angeles Times to release the Khalidi tape [2]. That’s a videotape held in the LAT’s vault of a going-away party for Rashid Khalidi, the University of Chicago professor who was on his way to Columbia to replace the vehemently anti-Zionest Edward Said as head of that university’s Middle East Studies department.
The party was reported to be quite an Israel bash, probably laced with some good-old fashioned Jew hatred. Rashid’s good friends the Obamas, Michelle and Barack, were in attendance. How much they agreed with the tenor of the evening we will never know, because the LAT refuses to release the tape. You would think the paper, given recent events and the decline in the Emperor’s popularity, might change its mind.
Fat chance. To do so would go against a narrative engrained in stone since at least 1968. They wouldn’t dare look inside that vault for fear they would have to act on what they might find. They are the real “chickensh*ts,” not Netanyahu.
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