{This was originally published at the Times of Israel.}
Is Barack Obama bigoted against Jews?
I have never thought so, but the question has arisen at Israel Thrives. And the fact of the matter is that many Jewish people do believe that Obama is anti-Semitic. That is a simple fact. What the percentages are I do not know, but a significant minority of Jewish people, or at least a significant minority of Jewish Americans, hold to this belief and therefore it should be discussed.
Let me start by saying that, no, I do not believe that Barack Obama is an anti-Semite.
An anti-Semite is someone who repeats certain specific tropes that have historically gotten Jews killed in pogroms great and small. Anti-Semitism is characterized by the repetition of particular themes. If someone suggests that Jews are blood-thirsty, or that the Jewish state is blood-thirsty, then that person is spreading anti-Semitism. If someone suggests that Jews control sovereign governments outside of Israel or that Jews have an undue and malicious influence over those governments, then that person is also spreading classic centuries' old anti-Semitic themes.
Barack Obama has never done any such thing.
I defy anyone to show me a quote by president Barack Obama in which he has expressed anything that could possibly be considered anti-Semitic. I have never seen anything of the sort. Therefore I cannot, and will not, consider Obama anti-Semitic until he does so.
If this is the case, and it is, it raises the question as to why so many Jews do consider the president of the United States to be racist against the Jewish people. The answer to that question is fairly obvious. Obama is not an anti-Semite, but he does support anti-Semitism throughout the world and at home. After all, does one need to be a racist to be friendly toward racists? If that is the standard than everyone is a racist because we all have a certain degree of racist tendencies and we all have friends who do so, as well.
So Barack Obama is not an anti-Semite, but merely a friend and supporter of anti-Semites. The obvious difference is that Obama is the president of the United States and the anti-Semites that he is friendly towards are not just some shmoes who live down the street, but highly influential political movements, such as political Islam and the Muslim Brotherhood, as well as highly influential American politicians, such as Chuck Hagel.
Obama supports the Brotherhood and he supports Chuck Hagel and both are deeply anti-Semitic. Obama knows this, of course, but he doesn't care which is why he gives very many Jewish people the impression that he, himself, is also anti-Semitic. What I would suggest is that the question of Obama's anti-Semitism is irrelevant. Whether or not Obama is racist toward Jews, the fact remains that he is a great supporter of those who dislike Jews including those, like Egyptian president Muhammed Morsi, who control armies directly adjacent to the border of the Jewish state.
This is what should be our focus of concern. Obama supports political Islam, and thus supports the Muslim Brotherhood. The rise of political Islam, under the misnomer "Arab Spring," is the most genocidally anti-Semitic movement on the planet today. The mullahs and the ayatollahs and the various religious leaders who are part of this movement consistently pour forth the most violent hatred toward the Jewish people and perpetually suggest that it is Allah's will that the Jews be annihilated.
Excuse me, but my father's side of the family was slaughtered during Operation Barbarosa during World War II by people who thought in a similar fashion. My father's side of the family comes from a town called Medzhybizh in the Ukraine. Medzhybizh, much to my astonishment, is also the shtetl where Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidic Judaism resided, taught and is buried. The Nazis came through in July of 1941 and forced the residents, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, to road building and the digging of ditches. Once the ditches were completed they lined up the Jewish population of the town, about 3,000 people, including all my relatives there, and shot them dead.
Anyone who knows anything about the history of the Muslim Brotherhood knows that they were allied with the Nazis during World War II and, yet, this is who Barack Obama supports, so how could it be any wonder that some Jewish people would consider Obama hostile towards Jews and thus anti-Semitic?
The Hagel nomination is just the icing on the cake. Of all the people that Obama could have chosen for Secretary of Defense he chose a man who apparently claimed in public that Israel controls the U.S. Department of State. The Department of State! The U.S. Department of State is the very least friendly branch of the American government toward Israel and, in fact, opposed its creation during the Truman administration. Traditionally, the Department of State has been "Arabist" and has sought to withhold U.S. recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of the Jewish State of Israel. Yet, somehow, against all reason, Chuck Hagel thinks that the Jews of Israel control the American State Department.
And this is the guy that Obama puts forward for Secretary of Defense?
So how can Jewish people not wonder if Obama is anti-Semitic?
I don't think he is because he doesn't blather anti-Jewish racist themes in public, but ultimately who cares? Obama promotes movements and organizations, including genocidal organizations like the Brotherhood, that are anti-Semitic.
So who am I to quibble?
Mike, you wrote:
ReplyDelete"An anti-Semite is someone who repeats certain specific tropes that have historically gotten Jews killed in pogroms great and small. Anti-Semitism is characterized by the repetition of particular themes. If someone suggests that Jews are blood-thirsty, or that the Jewish state is blood-thirsty, then that person is spreading anti-Semitism. If someone suggests that Jews control sovereign governments outside of Israel or that Jews have an undue and malicious influence over those governments, then that person is also spreading classic centuries' old anti-Semitic themes."
"Barack Obama has never done any such thing."
Mike, there are various ways to intentionally do action to cause others to hold antipathetic wrong views toward a certain group of people, and there are various ways to express one's own holding of what are antipathetic wrong views toward a certain group of people.
And, just regarding actions done by Barack Obama: What do you call the falsehoods that he told in his Cairo speech which were falsehoods that glorified Islam and "sophisticatedly" blamed Israel? What do you call his and his administration's support of, and obfuscation of the nature of, the ideologically genocidal anti-Jewish political organization the Muslim Brotherhood? What do you call his repeated diplomatic attacking of, and libeling of, the leaders of the government of the intendedly genocidally besieged, liberal democratic, very small, sole nation of the Jewish people, Israel, and his diplomatic supporting of the ideologically genocidal anti-Jewish organization Fatah-PLO? What do you call all of the actions that he has done to give an impression that Israel is the guilty and aggressive party in the Arab and Muslim racist war on Israel? What do you call his selection as nominee to the U.S. governmental position of Secretary of Defense someone who has explicitly expressed effectively genocidal "Western" typical anti-Jewish libels against the nation of the Jewish people?
And these are just things that have been done by Barack Obama. What the U.S. "establishment" has done in this vein toward Israel for the past over sixty years surpasses these things that Barack Obama has done in this vein toward Israel.
Particularly in this era, after the Holocaust, when, after the Holocaust, it has been socially unacceptable, in Western societies, to overtly express explicit effectively genocidal libels against the Jewish people, it has been, and is, precisely non-overt methods of intentionally doing action to cause others to hold antipathetic wrong views about the nation of the Jewish people and, as part of that, about the Jewish people, that contemporary anti-Jewish bigots who are the members of the most powerful agencies and branches of the governments of Western countries (and that contemporary anti-Jewish bigots who are members of, and who are the controllers of, the Western mass media) have been, and are, intentionally causing others to hold antipathetic wrong views about the nation of the Jewish people and, as part of that, about the Jewish people.
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On the the Western racist covert war on Israel:
http://www.hirhome.com/israel/guide-israel.htm
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Just a little bit about the Western media's racist covert libel war against Israel:
Antisemitism is everywhere in the mass media - sometimes it is relatively subtle..., by Francisco Gil-White
http://www.hirhome.com/israel/subtle.htm
A third option is that Obama is a smart Jew-hater, one who keeps it under wraps and goes for plausible deniability through his indirect, "hand under the table" support for the overt Jew-haters. I simply find it hard to believe that man didn't come out a Jew-hater from 20 years of being mentored by Jeremiah Wright, who is a Jew-hater and open about it.
ReplyDeleteBut, like you said, it doesn't matter practically speaking.