Mark Hemingway of the Federalist reminds readers about the “specter” of former President Barack Obama’s antagonistic stance toward Israel.
As of Monday morning, two days after Hamas committed horrible atrocities across Israel, the worst single attack in the country’s history, former President Barack Obama had yet to issue any statement about the attacks. There could be any number of benign reasons for that, but it’s also true that Obama’s relationship with Israel would lead one to speculate about some not-so-benign motivations.
Certainly, there are many legitimate questions to ask about the government of Israel’s behavior, the limits of America’s national interest in the region, and whether Protestant America’s fetishization of the “Holy Land” keeps us from seeing issues in the region with moral clarity. However, any fair-minded critique of Israel is a far cry from Obama’s well-established and radical views on the Middle East that stem, by his own admission, from his affinity for radicals such as Frantz Fanon, whose brain-dead swagger produced such sentiments as “decolonization reeks of red-hot cannonballs and bloody knives.”
And it’s probably time to admit that, while attempting to bury their aims under layers of academic sophistication, Obama and his acolytes used his presidency to destabilize the Middle East in the service of a left-wing ideology that excuses antisemitism and justifies terrorist violence.
In August, Tablet magazine published a much-discussed, comprehensive interview between David Samuels and Obama biographer David Garrow. The biggest headlines that emerged from that interview had to do with Garrow uncovering letters where Obama wrote in detail about his gay sex fantasies. But buried beneath that revelation was a substantial discussion of Obama’s anti-Israel politics. Or as Tablet’s David Samuels put it, “Obama’s hostility to American exceptionalism also seemed linked to his hostility to Israel, or more specifically to America’s identification with Israel.” As Samuels went on to note, the inexplicable fixation Obama had with making Iran — the world’s leading state sponsor of terror attacks, and the same country behind Hamas’ atrocities in Israel over the weekend — a regional hegemon in spite of Israeli (and Saudi) objections is ample proof of that.
