[img]1|left|||no_popup[/img]“If you actually took the number of Muslim Americans, we'd be one of the largest Muslim countries in the world” — Barack Obama
As a Jew and an American, I am bracing for a dose of political double jeopardy from President Obama on his latest Apology and Affirmation Tour after he lands in Cairo in a few hours.
As an American, I firmly grip both arms of my desk chair.
I wonder:
Will the President’s smiling but still-choked-up expression of undying affection for all Muslims, forever, or his head-bowing apology for serial American abuse of Muslims the past 8 years be the dominant theme of his trip.
As a Jew, I quiver constantly. I can hear 61 years of a special relationship between Israel and Washington gurgling down a Muslim-flavored political drain.
What has been just a dribbling sound until now will rise to a deafening level when Mr. Obama announces from the platform of one of the world’s most repressive police states that Israel promptly will freeze all West Bank settlements or else he will punish those recalcitrant Jews.
It Is Not What It Sounds Like
His gift for silky rhetoric, blended with the media’s infatuation with him will, however, make his raw rebuke sound suspiciously like a reward.
In the background and the foreground, his live Muslim audience will erupt in cheers that may shake your television set.
For the first time since the late1980s or early ‘90s, nearly all of the world’s 1.5 billion adherents of Islam will figuratively mob Mr. Obama in unrepentant joy.
What is a Jew to do?
I don’t know enough about Mr. Obama’s thinking mechanism to judge whether he truly realizes how nonsensical his settlements hypothesis is:
If Jews will stop all settlement building activity this morning, Muslims will instantly convert from anti-Semites into Jew-lovers who will recognize, and warmly embrace, the legitimacy of the Jewish state.
In every mainstream publication I know of, the West Bank and East Jerusalem both are routinely described in all news stories as “occupied.”
Where It Began
Says who?
By whom?
The New York Times introduced the acidly pejorative adjective into its daily accounts about18 years ago when, I believe, the regrettable columnist Tom Friedman still was the Times’ Jerusalem bureau chief.
Two questions that Mr. Obama will not acknowledge are:
• If the existence of settlements is preventing meaningful peace treaties from being enacted with totalitarian Muslim governments in the neighborhood, why wasn’t a “Palestinian” state established between 1948 and1967? During those 19 years, Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem were run, then as now, by Arabs. Not a live Jew was to be found anywhere?
• Returning to a question we have previously offered, if Muslims and Arabs are such coveted neighbors, why can’t Jews live in houses next to Arabs and Muslims? As we asked a few months ago, what if only Lutherans were permitted to live in Culver City?
Mr. Obama, who is stepping a little farther out of his increasingly empowered Muslim closet every day, has no response to either inquiry.
His campaign, of, by and for him, is entirely about emotion, dear reader, not rationality or history.
Israel is surrounded by 21 Muslim states. All seek Israel’s destruction, although three grudgingly have agreed that Israel should be allowed to breathe and exist.
On the day in May1948 that the United Nations officially sanctioned statehood for Israel, five Arab states invaded the land, and they have been at relenting war every day since.
The President is traveling to Riyadh. I cannot go there. I am a Jew. Jews are barred from this Muslim paradise. However, picky-picky.
If Israel will massively disrupt daily family life throughout its pocket-sized territory, 21 Arab governments will deftly put aside 61 years of deeply ingrained Jew hatred and active terrorism, lay down their rockets and morph into the Islamic Ozzie, Harriet, David and Ricky.
Does the President realize how irrational his proposition is?
Ever since Menachem Begin brought the conservative Likud Party to power 30 years ago — leading to a cold, but nevertheless official, peace treaty with Egypt — Israel has been asked to give up a little piece and a little piece more of land in exchange for recognition by whatever Arab government is in transcendance at the moment.
When they began chopping off a piece at a time, nothing happened. The guns did not quiet. The technical recognition that followed, from three of them, has not altered the landscape in the slightest.
But when you seem to be edging toward status as President of the Whole World, a 61-year losing streak is merely a horsefly on your shoulder, something to be swatted away.
