"I have not yet begun to fight!"

Copyright Disclaimer Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976?Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing. Non-profit, educational or personal use tips the balance in favor of fair use. Unless you are in this field of investigative journalism, especially covering extremely sensitive subjects and potentially dangerous subjects as well, you simply cannot understand the complexities and difficulties involved with this work that I face every day.

Wednesday, April 29, 2015

Obama Praises Jihad-Supporting Turkish Prime Minister

May 22, 2013 by Joseph Klein 14 Comments

Print This Post

Turkey’s jihad-supporting Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan received effusive praise from President Obama last week during their joint news conference in the White House Rose Garden. Obama described the Islamist leader, who unapologetically called Zionism “a crime against humanity,” as “a strong ally and partner in the region and around the world.”
This is just a continuation of President Obama’s infatuation with Erdogan. When the two leaders met at the Seoul, South Korea, Nuclear Security Summit in March of 2012, Obama called Erdogan his “friend and colleague….We find ourselves in frequent agreement upon a wide range of issues.” Not content with this level of praise, Obama added that he considered Erdogan “an outstanding partner and an outstanding friend” who has displayed “outstanding leadership.” In fact, Obama so admires Erdogan’s “outstanding leadership” that Obama has allowed the United States to lead from behind Turkey in Libya and Syria, sucking the U.S. into a swamp inhabited by Islamist jihadists.

As Barry Rubin, the director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal explained:

“Once again the Turkish government has taken the lead on U.S. policy by pushing for direct U.S. aid to the rebels. That means giving money, weapons, and other aid to the Muslim Brotherhood and more radical groups to take power because the real moderates in the Syrian opposition are rare.”

Obama fancies Turkey as a model of a modern democratic Islamic state. At their joint news conference last week, Obama praised Erdogan’s “reforms” and said “we will support efforts in Turkey to uphold the rule of law and good governance and human rights for all.”
Erdogan’s idea of democracy is an electoral system that he can manipulate in order to remain in power. His Islamist party has moved inexorably to replace the secular republic established by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk with an Islamic state. Erdogan’s jails have housed more journalists than any other country in the world, including Iran and Russia. And talking about Russia, Erdogan appears to be taking a page out of Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s playbook. Like Putin, Erdogan plans to play musical chairs between the prime minister post he now holds but cannot run for again under his party’s rules, and the presidency which he is intent on taking over in 2014 and converting into the country’s most powerful position from the symbolic one it is today. Erdogan will ram through whatever changes to the constitution are necessary to make this happen if a consensus cannot be reached.
“Turkey would walk into a dark dictatorship,” said Riza Turmen, a deputy from the opposition Republican People’s Party. “Turkey is already on this path. The parliament is unable to fulfill its duties even in a parliamentary system. The judiciary is not independent, the press is not free,” he told Reuters.
At last week’s joint news conference, President Obama lauded Erdogan’s supposed efforts to “normalize relations with Israel.” Erdogan then proceeded contemptibly to use the joint news conference to announce in Obama’s presence that he will be visiting Gaza next month, after previously rejecting Secretary of State John Kerry’s request not to go there at this time because it could interfere with just such a normalization of relations. Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh claimed that Erdogan’s upcoming visit to Gaza “emphasizes that the era of U.S. tutelage has ended.”
Aside from Barack Obama, Haniyeh has been one of Erdogan’s biggest cheerleaders. Back in 2010, Haniyeh said: “Mr. Erdoğan has become our voice and won hearts of all Palestinians. We began naming our children after Tayyip Erdoğan. The name of Erdoğan has been immortalized in Palestine.” He also called Turkey “the new Ottoman.”
In his description of Turkey under Erdogan’s leadership as “the new Ottoman,” Haniyeh has a much better idea of Erdogan’s true agenda than President Obama does. Obama thinks that Turkey, like the United States, is interested in removing President Bashar Hafez al- Assad from power in Syria in order to bring about a free Syria “that is intact and inclusive of all ethnic and religious groups,” as Obama put it in his joint news conference with Erdogan last week. That may be Obama’s naive aspiration but, as Hamas leader Haniyeh knows, Erdogan is interested in building “the new Ottoman” in the entire region, which means promoting revolutionary Sunni Islamism under Turkey’s leadership. Erdogan is using Obama to advance his Islamist agenda.

No doubt Erdogan will use his upcoming Gaza visit to further solidify Turkey’s prestige in the Muslim world, which will also help him politically at home. Expect, for example, Erdogan to push publicly for Israel to completely lift its embargo on the Gaza Strip. Expect him also to mark the three-year anniversary of the incident involving the Turkish-owned Mavi Marmara vessel in which a number of Turkish radicals lost their lives as they attempted violently to break Israel’s legal naval blockade of Gaza. They had assaulted Israeli naval commandos trying to stop the blockade-running ship. The radicals were heard chanting the jihad call to arms honoring Muhammad’s massacre of the Jews of Arabia: “Khybar, Khybar, O Jews, the army of Muhammad will return.”
Erdogan has exploited the Mavi Marmara incident for propaganda purposes for three years. But this was not just exploitation of an opportunity that happened to present itself to Erdogan. In fact, Erdogan was reportedly supportive of the flotilla idea all along before it set sail, because it would create a confrontation with Israel that would cost Israel in the court of public opinion, which is precisely what happened. A journalist on board the Mavi Marmara with good connections to government officials and the IHH group that organized the flotilla stated: “The Turkish government was behind the flotilla to the Gaza Strip and its objective was to embarrass Israel: ‘The Turks set a trap for you and you fell into it.’ The flotilla was organized with the support of the Turkish government and Prime Minister Erdogan gave the instructions for it to set sail. That was despite the fact that everyone knew it would never reach its destination.”
Immediately after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, at the urging of President Obama, apologized to Erdogan for the Marmara operation and committed to reach final agreement on compensation, Erdogan began backtracking from his own promise to restore full diplomatic relations with Israel and stop certain legal proceedings brought against Israeli soldiers.
Erdogan told Turkish reporters that it was too early to talk about dropping the Mavi Marmara case against the Israeli soldiers, and that normalizing diplomatic relations would come gradually. “We will see what will be put into practice during the process. If they move forward in a promising way, we will make our contribution,” Erdogan said.
Turkey is reportedly holding out for extraordinarily high compensation which, even if paid, would not satisfy some of the families of the radicals who became “martyrs” on the Mavi Marmara.
Yet, in the face of Erdogan’s continued anti-Israel rhetoric and his backtracking on his promises of normalization, Obama still made a special point at last week’s joint news conference “to note the Prime Minister’s efforts to normalize relations with Israel.”
Obama continues to play right into Erdogan’s hands as the devious Islamist leader prepares to visit with the Hamas terrorists in Gaza next month, to provide weapons and other support to Islamist jihadists in Syria and to consolidate his increasingly authoritarian power at home.
Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: Click here.

About Joseph Klein

Joseph Klein is a Harvard-trained lawyer and the author of Global Deception: The UN’s Stealth Assault on America’s Freedom and Lethal Engagement: Barack Hussein Obama, the United Nations & Radical Islam.

Monday, April 27, 2015

CERN: Subliminals, & Stargates: Illuminati's Plan for Satan's Arrival An...

Sunday, April 26, 2015

ALERT: Top Navy Officer FIRED by Obama For Exposing Massive Threat to US

President Barack Obama’s been on a roll when it comes to firing military officers — especially those who aren’t afraid to speak out against the administration and expose what’s really happening behind the scenes.
That seems to be the case with Capt. James Fanell, a senior Navy intelligence leader who was relieved from his position as the U.S. Pacific Fleet’s director of intelligence and information operations because he made public information about China that Obama didn’t want you to hear.

His comments, now being labeled “provocative,” revealed that after a recent Chinese amphibious exercise, naval intelligence officials assessed that China’s strategy was to be able to launch a “short, sharp war,” with Japan.
Fannell said the following about Chinese naval intentions: “(We believe) the (People’s Liberation Army) has been given the new task to be able to conduct a short, sharp war to destroy Japanese forces in the East China Sea following with what can only be expected (as) a seizure of the Senkakus or even southern Ryukyu (islands).”
Those actions could potentially lead to something along the lines of World War III.

Diabetes Discovery Shocks Doctors

Obama Will Not Finish His Second Term

You Will Not Believe Her Transformation

BREAKING: Another Top General Risks His Career to Expose Obama’s Destruction of the Military

There’s some serious push-back developing at the Pentagon. A number of top military officials have begun openly criticizing the Obama Administration.
Earlier this week, Marine Corps Gen. John F. Kelly issued a warning about the possibility of Ebola at the U.S. Mexico border via West African illegals sneaking across it and entering the U.S. Kelly stressed that pitiful border security and the Obama Administration’s inexplicable refusal to enforce immigration laws could lead to catastrophe.

Now, it’s the Army that has some harsh words for the White House, reports Western Journalism. Gen. Raymond Odierno, Army Chief of Staff, says that Pres. Obama’s plan to shrink America’s ground-combat forces is an outlandish move in the face of Putin’s aggressive maneuvers in Eastern Europe and the rise of ISIS.
The Army currently has 510,000 active duty members, but Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel is working with Army leaders to shrink that number to somewhere between 420,000-450,000 by deactivating brigades and firing mid-level officers. Budget cuts and spending battles between Congress and the White House are largely to blame. So is having a Commander in Chief who’s totally unequipped to command the military.
Stars and Strips reported that over 500 Army majors will be forced out of the military by next spring; almost 1,200 captains have also been cut as part of the Obama Administration’s downsizing plan. Army leaders received heavy criticism for notifying 48 of the captains while they were serving overseas in Afghanistan. Wait, what? The Army leaders caught flack for following the Obama Administration’s orders – orders that ultimately put our national security at risk, no less. You really can’t make this stuff up.

Diabetes Discovery Shocks Doctors

Obama Will Not Finish His Second Term

You Will Not Believe Her Transformation

Friday, April 24, 2015

Obama, the Jewish president

As a young man, the future leader of the free world absorbed the Yiddishkeit of a host of liberal-Jewish mentors, chief among them Rabbi Arnold Jacob Wolf

By Peter Beinart April 16, 2012, 3:27 pm

T-shirts in a clothing store in Jerusalem's Old City portray Barack Obama in traditional Arab kaffiyeh and Hassidic hat and sidelocks (photo credit: Abir Sultan/Flash 90)

Editor’s note: The following article was adapted from a chapter in Peter Beinart’s book “The Crisis of Zionism.” Read the full chapter here.

* * *

To understand how Obama came to embody the Jewish liberalism that America’s leading Jewish organizations have abandoned, one must understand his relationship with a rabbi named Arnold Jacob Wolf. And to understand Arnold Jacob Wolf, one must understand his relationship with Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel.

Heschel arrived in the United States in 1940, having spent most of his life in the cloistered embrace of Hasidic Poland. He walked off a boat in New York City and saw a black man shining a white man’s shoes. It was the first black man he had ever seen, and he identified with him fiercely, as a Jew.

Over the next three decades, Heschel — with his unruly hair and snow-white goatee — became America’s image of a Hebrew prophet. Again and again, he invoked God to challenge unjust human power. Heschel denounced McCarthyism, marched with Martin Luther King Jr., and erupted in anger during a meeting with Robert McNamara at the height of the Vietnam War. Again and again, he chided Americans, and American Jews, for their smug indifference to the evil done in their name. “Above all,” he wrote, “the prophets remind us of the moral state of a people: Few are guilty, but all are responsible.”

At Hebrew Union College, where he was studying to be a rabbi, Arnold Wolf served as Heschel’s private secretary, frequently accompanying him to the movies, which Heschel attended in hopes of losing his Yiddish accent. A Reform Jew and a fourth-generation American whose grandmother had seen Abraham Lincoln campaign, Wolf’s background was worlds away from that of his mentor. But he sponged Heschel’s prophetic example.

In 1957, Wolf established Temple Solel on Chicago’s North Shore and began causing trouble. He brought Martin Luther King Jr. to speak; he took congregants to Selma to march for voting rights; he picketed a Jewish hospital on behalf of striking black workers even though some of Temple Solel’s most prominent members served on the hospital’s board. He so passionately denounced the Vietnam War that in 1967 FBI agents infiltrated the synagogue and recorded one of his antiwar sermons.

Turning anguish into a crusade

Abraham Joshua Heschel died in 1972, just as American Jewish organizations were turning against the prophetic liberalism he embodied. In his declining years, he had grown increasingly anguished by Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip and Arnold Wolf turned that anguish into a crusade. Like his mentor, Wolf was a committed Zionist: For twelve straight years, Temple Solel paid for its Hebrew school graduates to spend the summer in Israel; on the eve of the 1967 war, Wolf mortgaged the synagogue’s building and sent Israel the money.

Hyde Park was, in its way, a lot like the Harvard Law Review. It was intellectual (the neighborhood’s largest employer was the University of Chicago), it was racially integrated, it was heavily Jewish, and it was hegemonically liberal.

But by the 1970s, Wolf’s devotion to Israel was leading him toward a confrontation with its government. In 1973, he helped start Breira (“Alternative”), the first American Jewish group to endorse a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza.

The reaction from the organized American Jewish community was savage.

Benjamin Epstein, coauthor of “The New Anti-Semitism,” urged the ADL’s parent organization, B’nai B’rith, to fire employees who associated with Breira. The Conservative movement’s Rabbinical Assembly denied Wolf — who had branched beyond Reform Judaism — a seat on its executive council. Members of Meir Kahane’s Jewish Defense League attacked Breira’s inaugural conference, trashing the hall and beating conferees.

What does all this have to do with Barack Obama? Actually, quite a bit. Far more than any previous president, Obama spent his adulthood in the company of Jews. His most important professional mentors were Jews; most of his big donors were Jews; many of his neighbors were Jews; his chief political consultant was a Jew. As Wolf himself would later say, Obama was “embedded in the Jewish world.”

But Obama was not embedded in the Jewish world; he was embedded in one specific Jewish world — a world of Jews who in the 1960s had opposed segregation and the Vietnam War and after 1967 applied the same liberal democratic principles when it came to Israel. Woven into the life stories of many of the Jews who most influenced the young Barack Obama was a bitter estrangement from the see-no-evil Zionism of the American Jewish establishment. In Chicago, those Jews constituted a geographic and moral community, a community that bred in Obama a specific, and subversive, vision of American Jewish identity and of the Jewish state. And at the heart of it all was Arnold Jacob Wolf.

In 1985, 24-year-old Barack Obama answered an ad in The New York Times. Three white community organizers, two of them Jewish, were looking for an African American colleague to give them credibility on Chicago’s largely black South Side, and Obama answered the call. Their leader was Jerry Kellman, who as a Jewish teenager in New Rochelle, New York, had petitioned the school board to stop teaching “Little Black Sambo” and had boycotted his high school graduation in protest against the Vietnam War.

While working with Kellman, Obama gravitated toward Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s Trinity Church, partly because of the church’s deep commitment to social justice, partly because it offered him the authentic African American experience he craved, and partly because it provided him a potential power base in black Chicago. But despite his yearning to be accepted in African American circles, and despite jeers from black nationalists, Obama always kept his community organizing work multiracial. As his biographer David Remnick has noted, he had come to Chicago not merely to find a black community, but to find a latter-day civil rights movement, and that movement, he believed, required whites, and especially Jews.

After community organizing, Obama attended Harvard Law School, where he became president of the law review. Accounts of Obama’s law school career sometimes describe Harvard as a place of bitter racial tensions, which Obama helped to soothe. But on law review, where Obama spent much of his final two years, there was also considerable ideological harmony. Some of Obama’s associates on law review were black, many were white, many of the whites were Jews, and with the exception of a few marginal conservatives, liberalism reigned across the color line. In his campaign for president of the law review, Obama’s main rival was David Goldberg, a Jewish New Yorker who, if anything, stood slightly to Obama’s left.

Obama places a note in the Western Wall during his 2008 presidential campaign (photo credit: Avi Hayon/Flash90)

“On the law review,” remembers one of Obama’s colleagues, “the black-Jewish alliance was intact.” Blacks and Jewish liberals “saw the world in pretty much the same way.”

When Obama returned to Chicago after law school, he settled in Hyde Park, whose largest synagogue, KAM Isaiah Israel, was led by Arnold Jacob Wolf. Hyde Park was, in its way, a lot like the Harvard Law Review. It was intellectual (the neighborhood’s largest employer was the University of Chicago), it was racially integrated, it was heavily Jewish, and it was hegemonically liberal.

So as in his community organizing, and as on the Harvard Law Review, Obama found himself not merely in the company of Jews, but Jews who, like him, wished to reconstruct the civil rights coalition. When Obama ran for the Illinois state senate in 1996, Wolf was one of his earliest and most prominent supporters. By the time he ran for president twelve years later, Obama had moved across the street from KAM Isaiah Israel, and the synagogue took a proprietary interest in his campaign. “This is a congregation,” explained Darryl Crystal, who became the rabbi after Wolf retired, “where the question wasn’t, ‘Are you going to vote for Obama?’ The question was, ‘What state are you going to help canvass?’”

Stressing the similarities

How did all this shape Obama’s view of Israel? In his pre-presidential career, the answer is clear: Obama saw Israel in much the same way Wolf did. In 2000, he reportedly told a Palestinian American activist named Ali Abunimah that he supported American pressure to make Israel change its policies, a view with which most of his Jewish friends would have concurred.

During his run for the US Senate in 2004, in response to a questionnaire from the Chicago Jewish News, he criticized the barrier built to separate Israel and its major settlements from the rest of the West Bank, a remarkable statement given that that same year, after the International Court of Justice condemned the barrier, 361 members of the House backed a resolution supporting it. When his US Senate campaign — at the request of local Jewish activists — submitted a position paper on Israel, the activists deemed it too weak, and obtained a rewrite.

Obama’s description of the Israeli- Palestinian conflict in his 2006 book, “The Audacity of Hope,” is also telling. In the one paragraph Obama devotes to the conflict, his central theme is the similarity between Israelis and Palestinians. He describes talking “to Jews who’d lost parents in the Holocaust and brothers in suicide bombings” and hearing “Palestinians talk of the indignities of checkpoints and reminisce about the land they had lost.”

During his run for the US Senate in 2004, in response to a questionnaire from the Chicago Jewish News, Obama criticized the barrier built to separate Israel and its major settlements from the rest of the West Bank, a remarkable statement given that that same year, after the International Court of Justice condemned the barrier.

Flying by helicopter over Israel and the West Bank, he says he “found myself unable to distinguish Jewish towns from Arab towns, all of them like fragile outposts against the green and stony hills.” While such rhetoric is hardly radical, it subtly contradicts the view of major American Jewish leaders, who usually reject any equivalence between Jewish and Palestinian suffering. The American Jewish establishment generally stresses the moral dissimilarity between Israelis and Palestinians; Obama in “The Audacity of Hope” does the opposite.

Perhaps most revealing of all, as an insight into Obama’s view of Israel’s occupation, is the fact that he read, and vividly remembers, David Grossman’s 1988 book, “The Yellow Wind.” Grossman is not only one of Israel’s leading novelists, he is among its leading intellectual doves, and “The Yellow Wind” is his searing account of the occupation, as he witnessed it during seven weeks on assignment in the West Bank for an Israeli newsweekly. It is difficult to read “The Yellow Wind” without being profoundly disturbed by its portrait of Palestinian life under Israeli rule. That Obama read it, along with the novels of another famed Israeli dove, Amos Oz, lends further credence to Arnold Wolf’s claim that in his pre-presidential years, Obama “was on the line of Peace Now.”

* * *

Peter Beinart is the editor of Open Zion and the author of “The Crisis of Zionism.”

Barack Obama: The first Jewish president?

Chicago circle nurtured him all the way to the top

December 12, 2008|By Tom Hundley, Tribune reporter

Writer Toni Morrison famously dubbed Bill Clinton "the first black president" -- a title he fervently embraced.
Abner Mikva, the Chicago Democratic Party stalwart and former Clinton White House counsel, offers a variation on that theme. "If Clinton was our first black president, then Barack Obama is our first Jewish president," says Mikva, who was among the first to spot the potential of the skinny young law school graduate with the odd name.

"I use a Yiddish expression, yiddishe neshuma, to describe him," explains Mikva. "It means a Jewish soul. It's an expression my mother used. It means a sensitive, sympathetic personality, someone who understands where you are coming from."
Obama, of course, is a Christian. And his middle name is Hussein. In the presidential election, he won 78 percent of the Jewish vote and about 70 percent of the Arab-American vote, according to unofficial exit polling. Obama collected 52.8 percent of the overall vote.
Putting aside which of the three great Abrahamic religions can lay claim to Obama's soul, it is clear that his political career, from its South Side inception to the audacious run for the White House, was nurtured and enabled by a close-knit network of Chicago Jews.
Mikva and his friend Newton Minow, the former Federal Communications Commission chairman and Kennedy-era New Frontiersman, were there at the beginning. Minow first heard about Obama in 1988 from his daughter Martha, a professor at Harvard, where Obama was studying law. Minow, senior counsel at Sidley Austin, offered him an internship and later a permanent job at the white-shoe firm, but Obama declined, saying he was planning to go into politics.
When Obama graduated, Mikva, then a U.S. appeals court judge in Washington, tried to lure him with a prestigious clerkship, but Obama turned him down too. That, according to Mikva, took some chutzpah.
Both Mikva and Minow say they sensed back then that Obama was something special. They made a point of staying in touch.
Obama's circle of Jewish patrons and advisers widened further in 1992 when he became involved in a voter registration drive that brought him into contact with Bettylu Saltzman, a liberal activist (and daughter of the late Philip Klutznick, a former commerce secretary and shopping mall developer). Saltzman says she knew from the moment she met Obama that he would someday be president. She introduced him to David Axelrod, who saw something similar.
Axelrod designed the strategy in which Obama first won the backing of white liberals and then reached out to blacks. Jews made up a significant number of the first constituency.
"As Jews got to know him, they recognized a kindred spirit, not someone who came down from Mars," Mikva said.
Rabbi Arnold Wolf, of KAM Isaiah Israel synagogue across the street from Obama's Chicago home, was another early backer. Like Mikva, he sees what he called Obama's "Jewish side."
"Obama is from nowhere and everywhere -- just like the Jews. He's black, he's white, he's American, he's Asian, he's African -- and so are we," Wolf said.

Certainly, Obama is comfortable with Jews, especially Jews from Chicago. Axelrod will remain at his side as senior adviser, and Rep. Rahm Emanuel will be White House chief of staff. Billionaire Penny Pritzker, who has known Obama since the mid-1990s and served as his campaign finance chairwoman, was said to be under consideration for commerce secretary until she took herself out of the running.
But Jews haven't always been comfortable with him. The once-solid alliance between Jews and blacks that was forged during the civil rights movement has frayed in recent years. During the primary campaign Sen. Hillary Clinton was far more popular among Jewish voters, many of whom were worried about Obama's close friendships with influential Palestinian thinkers, including his former Hyde Park neighbor Rashid Khalidi, now at Columbia University.
Mikva and Minow recall trying to help candidate Obama reassure skeptical Jewish audiences that he would be a genuine friend to Israel.
"He was frustrated," Mikva said. "And I remember I told him that it wouldn't matter if your name was Chaim Weizmann [first president of Israel], there are some Jews who won't vote for you no matter what you say because they are Republicans."
Obama jokingly asked if it would make a difference if he called himself Baruch Obama, noting that the Swahili name Barack and the Hebrew Baruch derive from the same linguistic root. Both mean "blessing."
Throughout the presidential campaign, Obama did and said what was necessary to court the Jewish vote. In March he made the pilgrimage to AIPAC, the powerful pro-Israel lobbying organization. There he pledged unwavering commitment to Israel's security. In July he traveled to Israel and was photographed with Israeli leaders.
Even without the Jewish vote, Obama would have carried New York, California and Illinois, three key states with large Jewish populations. Florida was a different story.

Is Barack Obama the First Jewish President?

Paul Waldman

March 12, 2012

It's not as crazy an idea as you might think.

If Bill Clinton was the first black president, as Toni Morrison famously observed, then could Barack Obama be the first Jewish president? That's the interesting case Jeffrey Goldberg makes at The Atlantic. Goldberg tells how he gave Obama a copy of a new Haggadah he contributed to:

When I handed him the Haggadah, President Obama, who famously stages his own seders at the White House, (which is a very nice philo-Semitic thing to do, IMHO) spent a moment leafing through it and making approving noises. Then he said (as I told the Times): "Does this mean we can't use the Maxwell House Haggadah anymore?"
George W. Bush was, in his own way, a philo-Semite, but he never would have made such an M.O.T. kind of joke (see the end of this post if you're not sure what M.O.T. means). Once again, Barack Obama was riffing off the cosmic joke that he is somehow anti-Semitic, when in fact, as many people understand, he is the most Jewish president we've ever had (except for Rutherford B. Hayes). No president, not even Bill Clinton, has traveled so widely in Jewish circles, been taught by so many Jewish law professors, and had so many Jewish mentors, colleagues, and friends, and advisers as Barack Obama (though it is true that every so often he appoints a gentile to serve as White House chief of staff). And so no President, I'm guessing, would know that the Maxwell House Haggadah -- the flimsy, wine-stained, rote, anti-intellectual Haggadah you get when you buy a can of coffee at Shoprite) -- is the target, alternatively, of great derision and veneration among American Jews (at least, I'm told there are people who venerate it).

Most conservatives wouldn't go as far as to accuse Obama of being an anti-Semite, but they certainly believe he's anti-Israel. Which is insane, of course, but what I've always found so striking about this question is how sidelined Jews themselves have become in today's discussions of Israel. That isn't to say there aren't particular Jews who are plenty involved, but the American Jewish community as it actually exists in America—mostly politically liberal, living its Judaism more as a culture than as a religion, troubled by the policies of the Israeli government in multiple areas—is increasingly estranged from the discussion, as more and more of that discussion is dominated by people like Sarah Palin and Rick Santorum. It's the world of post-Jewish Zionism, where Israel's most vehement advocates are people who see it mostly as a tool to use in a holy war between Christianity and Islam. As someone who grew up in a household where liberal Zionism was the primary expression of Jewish identity, I can't begin to describe how alienating it is to watch people like Palin waving Israeli flags around. And I'm pretty sure there are lots of other Jews who feel the same way.
Politicians spend much of their time trying to convince voters that they share a cultural understanding and affinity with voters—that they're "one of us," or at least that they get us, whether "us" is people of a particular religion, a particular social class, or a particular region. Their less successful attempts, like Mitt Romney saying "y'all" and proclaiming his newfound affection for grits, are widely noted and mocked. George W. Bush tried with the Jews—as he said, in my favorite Bush quote of all time, "I couldn't imagine somebody like Osama bin Laden understanding the joy of Hanukkah." But here's a case where Obama really does have an ease with, and an understanding of, a particular group. Yet he doesn't get a lot of credit for it.
Or maybe he does. Polls of Jews don't happen that often, because there are so few of them and that makes getting a sample of reasonable size time-consuming and expensive. But in 2008, Obama won 77 percent of the Jewish vote according to exit polls, about what other Democrats have gotten in recent years. For all the bleating from the American Likudniks (and yeah, I'll keep calling them that as long as they keep pretending that the only way to "support Israel" is to support the vision of the right-wing faction in Israeli politics) that Obama is anti-Israel, I don't think most Jews are going to buy it. Between now and November, I'm sure we'll see more articles like this one ("Has Obama Lost the Jewish Vote?"), after which he'll get right around the same proportion of votes from Jews as he did four years ago.

Comments

jnewsham

Mon, 2012-03-12 15:01

Permalink

Granted, there are many left-wing American Jews, but the Israeli left — at least when it is in the opposition — can be much more left-wing (as can the Israeli population at large) than many American Jews.
I also find it interesting that as much as the author decries the rebranding of being pro-Israel as "support[ing] the vision of the right-wing faction in Israeli politics," he buys into their language by billing folks like Palin and Santorum as "Israel's most vehement advocates." Does this mean they're winning?

TuJays

Tue, 2012-03-13 03:46