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Dem Congressmen Complain Obama’s Anti-Israel Push is Destroying Their Credibility w/Jews
Posted By Daniel Greenfield On April 2, 2015 @ 11:04 am In The Point | No Comments
Dem Congressmembers: “Take it down a notch or the scam we’ve been running all these years will be blown.”
Obama: “So what.”
That’s a fair summary of the situation referenced by Jason Reilly in the Wall Street Journal based on the Politico piece.
A dozen Jewish House Democrats laid it out for deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes during a meeting in the Longworth House Office Building last week: Enough. They’re just as upset about what Benjamin Netanyahu said ruling out a two-state solution, but President Barack Obama didn’t need to keep reminding them and everyone else.
Obama and his aides, they said, had to stop acting as if the Israeli prime minister’s comments are the only thing holding up a peace process that’s been abandoned for a year while not expressing a word of disappointment about Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas — and openly toying with allowing the Palestinians their provocative recognition bid at the United Nations. The swipes at Netanyahu felt vindictive, and gratuitous…
“You want us to go out and say the administration’s got Israel’s back. How are you going to get us to say that when our constituents believe that the administration is stabbing Israel in the back?” one Democratic Jewish member of Congress said later.
Among those present were Reps. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), Ted Deutch (D-Fla.), Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.), Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.), Brad Sherman (D-Calif.), Sander Levin (D-Mich.) and Nita Lowey (D-N.Y.).
Rhodes declined comment on the meeting.
This is not a particularly pro-Israel list. It features a number of J Streeters, but they still deal with pro-Israel constituencies and Obama is wrecking their scam. But Obama does not care.
From the Obama point of view, the old-fashioned Jewish Dem, like the old Cuban or the Democrat who believes in freedom of religion, is a dying breed about to be rendered irrelevant.
Obama has a list of lefty Jewish donors who want him to smash Israel and he cares a lot more about keeping them happy than some seniors in Florida, especially since he isn’t running for office again.
Reilly, who is African-American, comments on this in relation to the historic Black-Jewish alliance, a term that I think is a misnomer since it implies a broader degree of engagement between two sets of communities, when it was actually an interaction between two sets of leaderships.
Jews were also put off by the rise in black militancy beginning in the late 1960s, when groups like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee voted to expel whites—including several Jews—from leadership positions. Later, anti-Jewish black groups like Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam would gain prominence. Martin Luther King Jr. had equated anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism, but in the 1970s black leaders like Jesse Jackson would openly embrace Yasser Arafat and his Palestine Liberation Organization. In 1984, Mr. Jackson told a black Washington Post reporter that he was being unfairly treated by the “hymies” who controlled the media.
By the 1990s, Al Sharpton was wearing a King medallion around his neck while referring to Jews as “diamond merchants” and “interlopers” in Harlem. “If the Jews want to get it on,” he once told a black crowd, “tell them to pin their yarmulkes back and come over to my house.” These days Mr. Sharpton spends a lot of time at Mr. Obama’s house, where he counsels the president on race relations when he’s not lecturing the country on civil discourse from his MSNBC anchor chair.
If you can judge a person by the company he keeps, this is worrisome. America’s relationship with Israel is in tatters, and Jewish Democrats are right to wonder whether Mr. Obama—who spent 20 years marinating in the sermons of a pastor, Jeremiah Wright, who has called the Jewish state “illegal” and “genocidal”—much cares. The historical irony of the first black U.S. president cutting a deal with the ayatollahs that jeopardizes the security of Israel isn’t lost on Jews.
It’s a historical irony only to those who still think in ‘King’ terms. As Reilly documents, the trend has been toward anti-Semitism in populist black leadership (though the extent to which Jackson, Sharpton, etc represent anyone is also open to question.)
Obama would be the natural conclusion to what was arguably inevitable all along once civil rights returned to its function as a militant tool of the left and ceased being associated with religion and calls for equality. The racists won and racism is the result.
Obama isn’t a ‘black’ president. He’s a left-wing leader who exploits perceptions of race for his ideology. And that ideology is anti-Israel. If Sharpton and Jackson were bigots and profiteers with no real ideology, Obama is a flashback to the old days when the Communists used organizers to touch off race riots, not because they cared about civil rights, but because they wanted to bring down America.
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