Post-American Presidency (18 page)

But Obama and Jones never quite seemed to grasp the fact that only one side was teaching its children that the other was the “enemy.” And that sentiment was in any case hardly compatible with the new era of peace that was supposed to dawn with the establishment of this state. Would the Palestinians cease to regard Israel and the United States
as their “enemies” once this state was established? Would they begin to teach their children peace and tolerance? Would they renounce the jihad doctrine that settles for nothing less than the entire destruction of Israel, as their leaders have repeated on numerous occasions?

The real answer to all those questions and others like them is “no.” But even worse, Obama and Jones weren’t asking them. They were determined to establish a Palestinian state despite the abundant evidence that the Palestinians have not renounced their jihadist intransigence, and would use a new Palestinian state as a terror base from which to launch new attacks against the “Zionist entity”—just as Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza did not usher in the promised new era of peace, but only more jihad.

Obama and Jones should have known better. And they probably did. For they knew Hamas. Apparently, they liked Hamas. For as he made concessions to Hamas in Gaza, Obama pursued the same policy stateside, making numerous overtures to dubious Hamas-linked entities.

As we have seen, the promise of Israel’s destruction is in the first paragraph of the Hamas charter. This is no secret. And Hamas refuses to alter it or change its mission.

“Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it.”

But Obama didn’t just sidle up to Jew-haters abroad. He sought to legitimize them here as well. For one thing, he wasn’t through cozying up to the Islamic Society of North America.

THE JEW-HATING ISNA CONVENTION

His eye—as always—on outreach to Muslims, Barack Obama on July 3, 2009, sent Valerie Jarrett, his senior advisor and assistant to President Obama for public engagement and intergovernmental affairs, to
speak at the 46th Annual Convention of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA).

Jarrett ended up addressing a racist hate-fest. At the ISNA conference, pure hate speech and Islamic anti-Semitism were promoted—and the Obama administration was there.

Imam Warith-Deen Umar spoke about his books,
Jews for Salaam: The Straight Path to Global Peace
and
Judaiology
. Umar, the former head of New York prisons’ Muslim chaplain program, repeatedly described Jewish conspiracies to control the world: “Why do this small number of people,” he asked, “have control of the world?… There’s some people in the world says no Holocaust even happened. Some of their leaders say no Holocaust even happened. Well it did happen. These people were punished. They were punished for a reason, because they were serially disobedient to Allah.”
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He means that the Jews, who are portrayed as “serially disobedient to Allah” in the Qur’an, deserved all they got in the Holocaust.

Valerie Jarrett was there. She was apparently right at home, uttering nary a word of protest.

HAMAS TV IN WASHINGTON

That’s not all. In July 2009, Obama invited the propaganda television station of Hamas, Al-Quds TV, to film propaganda in the United States—on the American taxpayer’s dime.

The proposal came from the U.S. Consulate in Jerusalem: Al-Quds TV, the mouthpiece for Hamas, would film “several documentaries on the life of Muslims in America.

The nominated 2–3 person TV crew will conduct interviews with local Muslim leaders and individuals, visit Muslim institutions and organizations, and meet with USG officials.” All at U.S. taxpayers’ expense.
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The stated goal of this venture was to “improve attitudes of Palestinian public and leaders toward U.S. policies, principles, and people.” It would try to accomplish this by showing Muslims in America as “active participants in civil society” and highlighting their “contributions to U.S. society overall.” The documentaries would show that Muslims in the United States enjoyed “equal and full exercise of guaranteed civil rights and full protection under the law to practice their religion freely,” and would “help counter numerous local press reports of alleged discrimination against Muslims living in the United States.”
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Why did the State Department think it necessary to appeal to the Palestinians in this way? Why wasn’t it calling upon them to improve their
own
human-rights situation, and to end the endless vilification of Israel on the same TV stations that were slated to run these documentaries?

Why was it trying to improve the image of the United States, as if we were the guilty party, instead of challenging the oppressive and bloody rule of Hamas in Gaza?

In fact, this attempt to “improve the image of the United States” became official policy of the U.S. government. The State Department commissioned a confidential survey of Palestinians in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip. The Department of State’s Office of Opinion Research, the official pollster for the U.S. government outside the United States, is designed to gauge foreign public opinion so as to help diplomats in their missions. This office commissioned a “reputable local research firm” that conducted “face-to-face interviews” with “a representative sample of 2,000 adult Palestinians, age 18” to ascertain what could be done to “improve the image of the U.S.” in the minds of jihadist barbarians who celebrate the murders of people going about their business in buses and restaurants.

The results of the poll were hardly surprising. The respondents demanded more money (in line with the Qur’an’s demand that non-Muslims
pay tribute to Islamic rulers), more respect for Islam, and more pressure on Israel.

Was a survey like this one taken in Israel?
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HONORING AN ANTI-SEMITE

In August 2009, the Obama administration announced that Mary Robinson would be given the Presidential Medal of Freedom—the highest honor given to civilians in the United States.

Superficially, it seemed like a reasonable choice. Mary Robinson had been president of Ireland and United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. But—unsurprisingly, given Obama’s other appointments and associations—she has also been consistent in her virulent opposition to Israel. Gil Troy, a professor of history at McGill University in Toronto, notes that “she was one of the people most responsible for the great debacle at Durban, 2001, when a conference convened to fight racism became a UN-sponsored hate-fest against Jews.” Troy points out that “in her closing remarks Robinson declared ‘we… succeeded,’ a shocking statement considering that anti-Zionists hijacked the conference, demonizing Israel, bullying Jewish participants and distributing crude anti-Semitic images of hooked-nose Jews at the parallel NGO [Non-Governmental Organizations] forum.”
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Robinson also displayed a thoroughgoing pro-Palestinian bias and tendency to demonize Israel while serving as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. And her Medal of Freedom was no mistake, no oversight—for when Obama started looking for a Jewish group with which he could talk, he sought one out that held views about the Palestinians and Israel that were virtually identical to those of Mary Robinson.

J STREET

Obama kept finding new ways to go from bad to worse. He gave his official sanction to one Jewish group—J Street. J Street was unique among Jewish groups in being anti-Israel. Isi Liebler, former chairman of the Governing Board of the World Jewish Congress, challenged J Street’s “duplicity in trying to masquerade as a Jewish mainstream ‘pro-Israel’ organisation while consistently campaigning against the Jewish state.”
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Philip Klein,
The American Spectator
’s Washington correspondent, says that “while the group bills itself as the ‘pro Israel’ and ‘pro peace’ alternative to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, in reality it is a liberal organization actively campaigning against Israel’s right to defend itself.”
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Just how extreme and anti-Israel is J Street? According to Liebler, as of October 2009 “Arab and pro-Iranian elements were providing approximately 10% of J Street funding, a somewhat bizarre situation for a genuinely ‘pro-Israel’ organisation.”
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Federal Election Commission records showed that tens of thousands of dollars flowed into J Street from Arabs and Muslims, including some donations from groups involved in agitating for the Palestinian cause.
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Liebler pointed out that J Street seemed to attract support from groups that have always opposed Israel. Genevieve Lynch, a lobbyist for the National Iranian American Council, which has numerous ties to the bloody Iranian government, is a member of J Street’s finance committee. Judith Barnett, whom Liebler calls “a former registered agent for Saudi Arabia,” donates to J Street and is a member of its advisory council. Another donor to J Street is Nancy Dutton, a former lawyer for the Saudi Arabian embassy.
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In no other era would this radical group of self-hating Jewish sellouts have been anything but a fringe group.

But in Barack Obama’s America, this transparent front group became a darling of the White House. James Jones, the national security adviser, was the keynote speaker at the group’s very first annual convention in 2009. Other speakers included the former director of the hard-left group MoveOn.org, as well as Salam al-Marayati of the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC), who in the aftermath of 9/11 accused Israel of complicity in the attacks.

“If we’re going to look at suspects, we should look to the groups that benefit the most from these kinds of incidents, and I think we should put the state of Israel on the suspect list because I think this diverts attention from what’s happening in the Palestinian territories so that they can go on with their aggression and occupation and apartheid policies.”
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J Street was inevitable in the hostile climate for Israel that Obama has created in Washington. Once Obama was elected president, it was only a matter of time before a leftist Jewish group associated with anti-Semitic ideologies would emerge—particularly when those were the people the administration would meet with when choosing “Jewish groups” with which to confer.

As president, Obama could have chosen to meet and work with any Jewish group in the United States. He didn’t choose the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA). He didn’t even choose AIPAC.

Instead, Obama decided to work with J Street.

THE MISSING CZAR

During Obama’s first six months in office, his administration appointed upward of forty “czars.” But there was one czar appointment on which Obama dragged his feet for months—and it was an omission that spoke volumes. While he worked with relentless energy to create and fill new positions by the dozens, he suddenly seemed
overcome with lassitude when it came to appointing an Anti-Semitism Czar—and this was one appointment that was actually called for by law. The
Jerusalem Post
reported on July 30, 2009, that ‘the Obama administration has failed to name an envoy for monitoring and combating anti-Semitism around the world, as mandated by US law, since the previous ambassador was relieved of his duties at the start of the president’s term more than six months ago.’ Rafael Medoff, director of the Washington D.C.–based David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, explained: ‘Foot-dragging on the selection sends a message that anti-Semitism is not of great importance to the United States.’”
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Obama finally filled the position in mid-November 2009, but his choice was hardly comforting. For Obama’s new anti-Semitism czar was Hannah Rosenthal, former chief of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs (JCPA) and a current board member of none other than J Street. In April 2008 Rosenthal recalled the National Israel Solidarity Rally in Washington in 2002: “I recall much of that day with fondness and pride. I also recall the many rally attendees who pulled me aside to ask why the word ‘peace’ was so absent from the proceedings. How could we talk security without talking peace?… How did we arrive at a place where pro-Israel events had come to be dominated by narrow, ultra-conservative views of what it means to be pro-Israel?”
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Apparently Rosenthal heard only what she wanted to hear: that defenders of Israel were “narrow, ultra-conservative” warmongers. Journalist Ed Lasky observed of her appointment as anti-Semitism czar: “This is just one more pick by the president that has led many (especially the Israelis) to wonder about his claim to be pro-Israel. It is also one more step forward by J Street, a group with ties to George Soros, in their reach for power in Washington, D.C.”
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Other constituencies appeared to be more important to the post-American president. While extremely slow to appoint an envoy to monitor anti-Semitism, Obama swiftly instructed the State Department to create a Muslim outreach czar—a U.S. special representative for Muslim (
Ummah
) outreach, who reports directly to the secretary of state. This was at the urging of the head of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu. According to CNS News, when Ihsanoglu visited the White House on June 23, 2009, he “urged the US to quickly appoint an envoy to the Islamic bloc.” Obama promptly created the “new office that is responsible for outreach with Muslims around the world.”
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