Jonathan S. Tobin
Commentary Magazine
2/9/2015
There has been a great deal of justified criticism about President Obama’s unwillingness to respond to terrorist outrages with the sort of moral leadership that can rally the West to fight back. His comments at last week’s National Prayer Breakfast in which he sought to create a false moral equivalency between ISIS’s horrific burning alive of a captured Jordanian pilot and the Christian West’s past sins during the Inquisition and even the Crusades have been rightly blasted for his tone-deaf approach to terrorism. The president seems so mired in his deep ambivalence about the West’s role in world history that he is unable to play his part as leader of the free world in what is, like it or not, a life-and-death struggle against truly evil forces. It is also revealed in his administration’s refusal to call Islamist terrorism by that name. But just as troubling is his unwillingness to address one of the primary characteristics of this brand of terror: anti-Semitism. In an interview with Vox’s Matthew Yglesias, he described the terror attack on a Paris kosher market as a “random” event rather than an act of murder motivated by Jew hatred. Though it won’t get the same attention as his outrageous speech last week, it gives us just as much insight into the president’s foreign-policy mindset…
…Why does the president have such a blind spot when it comes to anti-Semitism? His critics will jump to conclusions that will tell us more about their views of Obama than about his thinking. But suffice it to say that this is a president who finds it hard to focus on the siege of Jews in Europe or of the State of Israel in the Middle East. Nor can it be entirely coincidental that a president who treats Israeli self-defense and concerns for its security as a bothersome irritant to his foreign policy or seeks to blame the Jewish state’s leaders for obstructing a peace process that was actually blown up by the Palestinians would have a blind spot about anti-Semitism…
Read the entire article at Commentary Magazine.
Related: ‘This Is Unreal’: Outrage Over Obama’s Description of Four Jewish Victims Murdered During Paris Kosher Deli Standoff (video)
…“It is entirely legitimate for the American people to be deeply concerned when you’ve got a bunch of violent, vicious zealots who behead people or randomly shoot a bunch of folks in a deli in Paris,” Obama said.
He continued: “We devote enormous resources to that, and it is right and appropriate for us to be vigilant and aggressive in trying to deal with that — the same way a big city mayor’s got to cut the crime rate down if he wants that city to thrive. But we also have to attend to a lot of other issues, and we’ve got to make sure we’re right-sizing our approach so that what we do isn’t counterproductive. I would argue that our invasion of Iraq was counterproductive to the goal of keeping our country safe.”…
Photos via The Gateway Pundit where there is video and more.
Obama says he has ‘real split’ with Netanyahu on Iran
…“Now, I don’t want to be coy,” he said. “The prime minister and I have a very real difference around Iran — Iran’s sanctions.”
“It does not make sense to sour the negotiations [with Tehran] a month or two before they’re about to be completed, and we should play that out,” he said, citing support from Merkel and British Prime Minister David Cameron. “In fact, if we can get a deal, we should embrace that.”
If talks ultimately fail, Obama said he would be the first to call on Congress to impose even harsher sanctions against Iran.
“But what’s the rush? Unless your view is that it’s not possible to get a deal with Iran and it shouldn’t even be tested,” he added.
Over the past year, Netanyahu has spoken out against the pace and thrust of the negotiations with Tehran…
Benjamin Netanyahu: I’m still planning to address Congress
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Monday that he still intends to address the U.S. Congress on the Iran nuclear deal.
“This is not a political issue or a party issue, neither here nor there,” Netanyahu said during an election event, according to Haaretz. “This is an existential issue, and I approach it with the fullest responsibility.”
The prime minister reiterated his view that the ongoing negotiations between the Obama administration and Iran are not in Israel’s national interest. “While some are busy with protocol or politics, a bad deal with Iran is taking shape,” he said…
Update: Mark Levin: Obama ‘Is Building the Iranian Islamo-nazi Caliphate’ (audio)
While innocent people are being slaughtered in the Middle East and Africa by Islamist radicals, not unlike when the Jews were being rounded up and killed by the Nazis, President Barack Obama is “barely” responding and is instead negotiating with Iran and “building the Iranian Islamo-nazi caliphate,” said best-selling author and nationally syndicated conservative talk radio host Mark Levin…
