In this morning’s Wall Street Journal, Bret Stephens analyzes President Obama’s deeply cynical speech to AIPAC.
In addition, Stephens points out that before becoming president, Obama’s mentors on Israel were radical Jewish leftists whose views of Israel are closely aligned with Islamic Jihad.
Like George Orwell, Seraphic Secret believes that language matters. Obama’s speech to AIPAC was filled with his trademark “I,” as in “I have your back.”
It should be: “America has your back.”
Setting aside the absolute zero which is at the heart of Obama’s promise, let us note that the first person narrative is a rhetorical device used by those in power to project a personal involvement. In this way, through a standard literary device, Obama casts himself as the protagonist in a heroic drama.
This is how dictators and totalitarians move the masses. It is how the cult of personality is established and maintained. The state—in this case America—becomes indistinguishable from the head of state. Remember, the German army took an oath of loyalty to Adolph Hitler, not to Germany. To the Chinese Mao was China and China was Mao. There is no Cuba without Castro.
America as a Republic, has resisted the monarchic worship of personality—until now.
The Obama cult of personality has been used as a deliberate strategy ever since he burst on the national scene. From the Socialist style “hope and change” poster to grade school children singing Obama’s praises, the Obama cult has become an invisible poison in the American body politic.
Should Israelis and pro-Israel Americans take President Obama at his word when he says—as he did at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee policy conference in Washington, D.C., on Sunday—”I have Israel’s back”?
No.
Here is a president who fought tooth-and-nail against the very sanctions on Iran for which he now seeks to reap political credit. He inherited from the Bush administration the security assistance to Israel he now advertises as proof of his “unprecedented” commitment to the Jewish state. His defense secretary has repeatedly cast doubt on the efficacy of a U.S. military option against Iran even as the president insists it remains “on the table.” His top national security advisers keep warning Israel not to attack Iran even as he claims not to “presume to tell [Israeli leaders] what is best for them.”
Oh, and his secretary of state answers a question from a Tunisian student about U.S. politicians courting the “Zionist lobbies” by saying that “a lot of things are said in political campaigns that should not bear a lot of attention.” It seems it didn’t occur to her to challenge the premise of the question.
Still, if you’re looking for evidence of Mr. Obama’s disingenuousness when it comes to Israel, it’s worth referring to what his supporters say about him.
Consider Peter Beinart, the one-time Iraq War advocate who has reinvented himself as a liberal scourge of present-day Israel and mainstream Zionism. Mr. Beinart has a book coming out next month called “The Crisis of Zionism.” Chapter five, on “The Jewish President,” fully justifies the cover price.
Mr. Beinart’s case is that Mr. Obama came to his views about Israel not so much from people like his friend Rashid Khalidi or his pastor Jeremiah Wright. Instead, says Mr. Beinart, Mr. Obama got his education about Israel from a coterie of far-left Chicago Jews who “bred in Obama a specific, and subversive, vision of American Jewish identity and of the Jewish state.”
At the center of this coterie, Mr. Beinart explains, was a Chicago rabbi named Arnold Jacob Wolf. In 1969, Wolf staged a synagogue protest in favor of Black Panther Bobby Seale. In the early 1970s, he founded an organization that met with Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization—this being some 20 years before Arafat officially renounced terrorism. In the early 1990s, Wolf denounced the construction of the Holocaust Museum in Washington.
And, in 1996, the rabbi “was one of [Mr. Obama’s] earliest and most prominent supporters” when he ran for the Illinois state Senate. Wolf later described Mr. Obama’s views on Israel as “on the line of Peace Now”—an organization with a long history of blaming Israel for the Arab-Israeli conflict.
President Obama with AIPAC President Lee Rosenberg at the AIPAC conference in Washington, D.C., on Sunday.
Mr. Obama had other Jewish mentors, too, according to Mr. Beinart. One was Bettylu Saltzman, whose father, developer Philip Klutznick, had joined Wolf in “his break with the Israeli government in the 1970s.” Ms. Saltzman, writes Mr. Beinart, “still seethes with hostility toward the mainstream Jewish groups” and later became active in left-wing Jewish political groups like J Street. Among other things, it was she who “organized the rally against the Iraq War where Obama proclaimed his opposition to an American invasion.”
Ms. Saltzman also introduced Mr. Obama to David Axelrod, himself a longtime donor to a group called the New Israel Fund. For a flavor of the NIF’s world view, a WikiLeaks cable from 2010 noted that an NIF associate director told U.S. embassy officials in Tel Aviv that “the disappearance of a Jewish state would not be the tragedy that Israelis fear since it would become more democratic.”
Other things that we learn about Mr. Obama’s intellectual pedigree from Mr. Beinart: As a student at Columbia, he honed his interests in colonialism by studying with the late pro-Palestinian agit-Prof. Edward Said. In 2004, Mr. Obama “criticized the barrier built to separate Israel and its major settlements from the rest of the West Bank”—the “barrier” meaning the security fence that all-but eliminated the wave of suicide bombings that took 1,000 lives in Israel.
We also learn that, according to one of Mr. Beinart’s sources, longtime diplomat Dennis Ross was brought aboard the Obama campaign as part of what Mr. Beinart calls “Obama’s inoculation strategy” to mollify Jewish voters apprehensive about the sincerity of his commitments to Israel. Not surprisingly, Mr. Ross was a marginal figure in the administration before leaving last year.
In Mr. Beinart’s telling, all this is evidence that Mr. Obama is in tune with the authentic views of the American Jewish community when it comes to Israel, but that he’s out of step with Jewish organizational leadership. Maybe. Still, one wonders why organizations more in tune with those “real” views rarely seem to find much of a base.
But the important question here isn’t about American-Jewish attitudes toward Israel. It’s about the president’s honesty. Is he being truthful when he represents himself as a mainstream friend of Israel—or is he just holding his tongue and biding his time? On the evidence of Mr. Beinart’s sympathetic book, Mr. Obama’s speech at Aipac was one long exercise in political cynicism.
Obama does have our “back” — to keep stabbing us when we are not looking all the time.
“Until now”…? The US seems to have been practicing at the cult of personality with the Kennedy clan for over 50 years now. No matter what they do, the likes of Vanity Fair can’t get enough of those tousled locks and toothy grins.
Very good point Earl. It seems about every decade or so another woman comes “out of the closet” to admit that she was also a Monica Lewinsky.
The latest was a 19 year old intern at the time.
Some historians have suggested that the Cuban Missile Crisis happened because Khrushchev was emboldened by Kennedy’s backing off support of the fighters at the Bay of Pigs.
But I think Robert is making Obama a unique case because he is trying to use the language of world despots to solidify his support.
Re Mimi Alford
This person was nothing then and is nothing now. The relationship she claims with The president is on a par with the revelations she currently makes. The product of weakness and self-indulgence. Hers not his. None of us were present at that time, but we are all present currently. The dust bin of history is too much for Mimi.
Also a good point Barry – it has amazed me to read of people who knowingly put themselves in a less-than-flattering light all for that 15 minutes of fame and some book royalties.
Sometimes being in that dust bin – with the cloak of anonymity – seems pretty good.
Just read that after so many decades of notoriety and “celebrity” Paul McCartney is tiring of it – with people coming up to him with camera phones at restaurants.
Benny – good point too. You seem to have my sense of dark humor.
There wasn’t much between Bill and Jack. For all their perceived moral failings, they ran reasonably efficient administrations. Mostly… fashionable history has ignored Jack’s role in significantly ramping up US involvement in Vietnam.
I’m reminded of a piece I read several years back, suggesting that people tend to specialise in their zone of moral failure and that, if so, better one has a sex-crazed president because he’ll be failing in his trousers rather than economic management.
Barry Dunham has never been suspected of marital faithlessness, but he is a terrible president. Bill Clinton is a sleazebag, but managed to balance the budget. The economy grew under his watch and he would never have bowed to a Saudi king.
I agree with Abigail. That was a an astute and provocative observation regarding Obama’s use of the first person.
You make a fascinating and brilliant observation regarding Obama’s use of the first person. I used to merely chalk it up to his unabashed narcissim and self-importance, but in light of your post Obama is essentially invoking a long-standing psychological mechanism the left, which serves to create an extricable knot between the head of the state and the state. It truly is unprecedented and frightening that such a thing could happen in the USA, isn’t it?
I tried watching Obama’s speech and had to stop just to keep from spitting up my last three meals as he painted himself the greatest supporter of Israel. I kept waiting for him to reach into a bag and put on a skull cap and prayer shawl as he finished his speech in Hebrew to prove he just loves Jews and won’t let anything happen to them.
Obama had to personalize his protection of Israel because if he ever were questioned about his associations with anti-Semites and enemies of Jews around the world he’d have a hard time being believed. To the msm, any Jewish support for Obama is enough to show how much he is loved by reasonable Jews just as some liberal nun’s support for Obamacare was enough to portray Catholic opponents as out of step.
Anyone believing Obama will stand up to Israel’s enemies please contact me – I have a bridge in Brooklyn I can sell you at a very good price.
Johnny – reminds me of last year when to shore up his Jewish support as he was lighting the Menorah last Hanukkah he (if I remember this right) was lighting all the candles at once and saying something like “It’s Party Time”
While I don’t know the exact ceremony that isn’t right, is it? 😉
Bill:
I think what Obama actually said was “It’s Partaaaaaay Time!”
Rev Wright told him that’s how it’s pronounced in the original Hebrew and Louis Farakhan agreed.