In yesterday's TownHall.com, Mona Charen had a column which provides further evidence that, as Ben Shapiro so aptly put it, Barack Obama is the most dangerous candidate for the State of Israel since its creation in 1948. Despite Obama's phony protestations to the coontrary, there is little doubt that if elected, his foreign policy will take a sharp turn in favor of the Palestinians.
Jews who believe that an Obama presidency will be a disaster for Israel are not the wacko racists that the left-wing JewsForObama.com and Jeffrey Goldberg accuse us of being. They play the race card to discredit us. It is only a matter of time before they will accuse us of being Nazis - the self-professed Marxist professors at the college where I taught often called me a Nazi.
Liberal Jews are so committed to the Democrats that no amount of evidence about Obama's anti-Israel/pro-Palestinian circle of advisers, his Palestinian pals and his anti-Semitic friends will persuade them not to vote for the Democratic candidate. The fact that top Hamas adviser Ahmed Yousef endorsed Obama last April doesn't bother them in the least.
And liberal Jews are not concerned by the fact that New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, no friend of the Republicans, reported that large contributions to the Obama campaign originated in Iran and in Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries, all of which have called for the extermination of the "Zionist entity."
Nor are liberal Jews troubled by reports that the Los Angeles Times has a video of Barack Obama at a party for Palestine Liberation Organization associate Rashid Khalidi, toasting that anti-Israel propagandist and listening to the recital of an anti-Semitic poem - the Times, which endorsed Obama, has refused all requests for the release of that video.
What with the resurgence of anti-Semitism in Germany, France and other western European countries, and with Israel the last place of refuge for persecuted Jews, Shapiro had it exactly right when he wrote that any American Jew who votes for Obama ought to be ashamed of him or herself.
Here is Mona Charen's TownHall.com column:
DOES OBAMA'S FRIENDSHIP WITH KHALIDI MATTER TO JEWS? by Mona Charen
From the Palestinian Authority Daily: "Twenty-three-year old Ibrahim Abu Jayyab sits by the computer in the Nusairat refugee camp (in the Gaza Strip) trying to call American citizens in order to convince them to vote for the Democratic candidate for president, Barack Obama..."
Like many Palestinians, Abu Jayyab is excited about the prospect of an Obama presidency. (By the way, the Gaza Strip is completely under the control of Hamas. Why then do they persist in speaking of "refugee camps"? But of course, we know why.) If Abu Jayyab and many others in the Palestinian areas are delighted, why are so many American Jewish voters feeling the same way? One side or the other has the wrong man. Which is it?
I've heard from some American Jews that they do not believe Obama is sincere in his leftism. They believe/hope that the anti-Israel sentiments and associations of his past were purely opportunistic; that once in the White House he will shed them like yesterday's fashions. That's quite a leap of faith.
Many politicians have distanced themselves from positions and associations of their youths. But in Obama's case, he is distancing himself from positions staked out as recently as 2003. As National Review Online has reported, the Los Angeles Times is apparently sitting on a videotape showing Obama's remarks at a farewell dinner that year for Rashid Khalidi, the one-time PLO spokesman who now heads the Middle East Studies Department at Columbia. (Columbia University's shame is a subject for another column.) Khalidi is not distancing himself from his past. Consistent with what you'd expect from someone who justified PLO attacks on civilians in Israel and Lebanon from 1976 to 1982, Khalidi routinely refers to Israel as a "racist" and "apartheid" state, and professes to believe in a "one-state" solution to the conflict. Guess which country would have to disappear for that "one" state to come into existence?
The Khalidis and Obamas were good friends. In his capacity as a director of the Woods Fund, Obama in 2001 and 2002 steered $75,000 to the Arab American Action Network, the brainchild of Rashid and Mona Khalidi. According to an L.A. Times account of the dinner, Obama mentioned that he and Michelle had been frequent dinner guests at the Khalidi home (just another guy in the neighborhood?) and that the Khalidis had even baby-sat for the Obama girls. Like William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, the Khalidis held a fundraiser for Obama in their living room when he unsuccessfully sought a House seat. At the farewell dinner, according to the L.A. Times, Obama apparently related fondly his "many talks" with the Khalidis. Perhaps that's where he learned, as he told the Des Moines Register that "Nobody is suffering more than the Palestinian people." Obama told the crowd that those talks with the Khalidis had been "consistent reminders to me of my own blind spots . . . It's for that reason that I'm hoping that, for many years to come, we continue that conversation -- a conversation that is necessary not just around Mona and Rashid's dinner table" but around "this entire world."
Even less attention has been paid to the man Obama appointed as his emissary to the Muslim community in the U.S., Mazen Asbahi. Asbahi, it turned out, had ties to the Islamic Society of North America, which in turn was an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation case. The Holy Land Foundation was accused of being a front group for Hamas. When news of these associations became public, Asbahi resigned from the campaign to "avoid distracting from Barack Obama's message of change." And don't forget hope!
Many American Jews preparing to pull the lever for Obama have never heard of Asbahi. But they surely know about Jeremiah Wright. They know that he gave a "lifetime achievement" award to Louis Farrakhan; that he supported efforts to get U.S. businesses to divest from Israel; that he gave space in the Trinity Church bulletin to Hamas; and that he has accused Israel of "genocide" against the Palestinians. They are preparing to vote for a man who tamely tolerated all of that (and more) for 20 years.
Someone is making a big mistake -- and it isn't Abu Jayyab.
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