Leadership: President Obama staged a political show for a Jewish audience Wednesday, loudly warning of the new atmosphere of anti-Semitism in Europe and the U.S. It’s a hollow statement, given his weak record on a rapidly metastasizing problem.
“Here, tonight, we must confront the reality that around the world, anti-Semitism is on the rise. We cannot deny it,” the president told his listeners at the Israeli embassy on Wednesday night. Citing the flight of Jews from Western Europe, as well attacks on Jews in India and Kansas, he got his lines right in concluding, “When we see that, we must not be silent.”
Problem here is that these conditions are the very result of his silences, denials, and lifelines to Islamists for political purposes. What’s more he’s ignored the behavior in the U.S. of an increasingly anti-Semitic intelligentsia that has added to the atmosphere where terrorism can flourish. In short, it’s been an absence of leadership from the supposed leader of the free world that has assured this plague’s spread.
In typical straw-man fashion, Obama equated the attack of a Ku Klux Klan-linked lunatic on a Jewish center in Kansas in 2014, to the large-scale mass flight of Jews from Europe as they are systematically persecuted in the name of political correctness and the empowerment by Europe’s elites of Islamofascist migrants. To him, there’s little difference between the two, despite the easy control-ability of one and the huge failure to lead on the other.
It’s nothing but a way of obscuring the very real problem of Islamic anti-Semitism by equating fringe criminals with major failures of U.S. and European Union policy.
Fact is, President Obama has been strangely silent as Iran’s Islamofascist rulers have vowed to destroy Israel as a state aim in public statements. It’s the result of the President’s desire to “make history” by cutting a nuclear deal with Iran, which Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has rightly warned is a mortal threat to Israel. He got stepped up espionage from the U.S. and even campaign operatives helping his opposition as a result.
Obama’s also been silent in the United Nations as Israel has been condemned for various supposed transgressions. Where’s his speech on the evils of anti-Semitism to the non-Jews at the United Nations? It’s not there.
Obama’s also held Israel’s enemies to a lower standard of behavior than Israel itself in his useless Palestinian “peace process” talks, demanding that only Israel and not its anti-Semitic enemies make concessions. Obama has even warned Israel that the support it has garnered from 40 years of U.S. policy would no longer be assured in UN votes.
And in the worst of his silences, Obama has kept the words “radical Islam” from the U.S. government lexicon as terror attacks, often on Jews, have escalated. During an anti-Semitic attack on a Jewish supermarket in Paris last year, he dismissed it was the work of “zealots” who “randomly shoot a bunch of folks” instead of put his finger on the essential anti-Semitism of the attackers.
His inability to use the world “Islamic,” “Islamist” or “Islamofascist” as an identifier of the source of the terror attacks has much to do with his inability to admit that their targets are Jews. His silence and denial means to suggest there is no rhyme or reason in who terrorists choose to kill. And it says something that not only did Obama not speak out at that time, he failed to come to the demonstration in Paris to reaffirm civilized values in the wake of the Jewish supermarket attack and the related attack on a Paris newspaper.
As a result, Jews are fleeing Western Europe in numbers not seen since the Holocaust era. Anti-Semitic attacks are up 40% since 2008, the European Jewish Congress estimates.
Obama’s silence has been so conspicuous, his rival, Vladimir Putin has seized the opportunity to offer Europe’s Jews haven in Russia this week. “Let them [Jews] come to us then,” Putin told Vyacheslav Kantor, the president of the European Jewish Congress, adding that “during the Soviet period they were leaving the country, and now they should return.”
Back home, Obama’s also been dead silent as U.S. college campuses have been engulfed in the Palestinian-led and highly anti-Semitic project linked to his own progressives: the “boycott, divest and sanction” movement against Israel, a major move to undercut the Jewish state economically. Just Thursday, Obama’s Department of Homeland Security acceded to the demands of anti-Semitic activists by now requiring goods originating from the West Bank to be labeled separately labeled and identified from Israeli products, the better to enable boycotts from the politically correct.
It adds up to a sorry picture of lip service to the idea of opposing anti-Semitism, but a fundamental failure to identify its roots and admit its evil aims. The production at the embassy was stage-managed by film director Steven Spielberg. In the case of Obama it was nothing but an act.