Israel Matzav

Ali Abunimah gets nervous for no reason

This is an interview with Ali Abunimah, the man who introduced President elect Barack Hussein Obama to such 'Palestinian' luminaries as Edward Said and Rashid Khalidi. He's also the co-founder of the Islamic hate site Electronic Intifada.

Let's go to the videotape.



He sounds nervous, doesn't he? But he's reading too much into Obama's selection of Rahm Emmanuel as Chief of Staff. Because while Muslims will never desert their own, Jews will. Here's what (I assume he's Jewish) Jeffrey Goldberg wrote in the Atlantic about the Emmanuel selection.

Peace-processors take heart: Rahm, precisely because he's a lover of Israel, will not have much patience with Israeli excuse-making, so when the next Prime Minister tells President Obama that as much as he'd love to, he can't dismantle the Neve Manyak settlement outpost, or whichever outpost needs dismantling, because of a) domestic politics; b) security concerns, or c) the Bible, Rahm will call out such nonsense, and it will be very hard for right-wing Israelis to come back and accuse him of being a self-hating Jew. This is not to say that he's unaware of Palestinian dysfunction, or Iranian extremism, but that he has a good grasp of some of Israel's foibles as well. All in all, it's a very heartening choice.

They think they'll tough love us to death. Just like the Clinton administration tried to do using Dennis Ross, Dan Kurtzer and Martin Indyk (Ross and Kurtzer are also prominent Obama advisers). As reader Danny in Tokyo wrote to me this morning regarding those three:

[They] can hardly be said to have malice in mind vis-a-vis The Homeland but who just the same have (almost laughably) colossal blind spots regarding Israel's security requirements and what constitutes effective relations with the Arab world. It's a worldview, not uncommon among left-leaning Israeli public figures as well, that Boston-area psychiatrist and Harvard Medical School instructor Kenneth Levine (in his outstanding book "The Oslo Syndrome") points out is akin to the mentality of an abused child.

That's a syndrome that goes back to the prophets, who pointed out that those who would destroy the Jewish people usually emerge from among them.

The Obama administration looks like it's going to walk in the footsteps of the Clinton (if not the Carter) administration in loving Israel to death. Let's hope Israel installs a government strong enough to see through it in February.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 1:48 PM