Obama: 'I am the closest thing to a Jew that has ever sat in this office'
I'm sure you'll all be shocked that the headlines have gone to his head. Yes,
he really said that (Hat Tip:
Memeorandum).
Obama’s close advisor David Axelrod was more critical of Netanyahu.
“The world of politics everywhere is
divided into two categories: the first and more common is the people who
run for public office because they want to be somebody,” he explained.
“A smaller group is made of respectable people who run for public office
because they want to do something – something positive. Shape the
future in a positive way. I think Benjamin Netanyahu completely falls in
the first category. He is a great politician. He knows what he needs to
do to get through the next election. But it seems to me that Israel has
to think about what they need to do to get through the next
generation.”
He also recalled Obama venting in a
moment of contemplation, telling him, ‘You know, I think I am the
closest thing to a Jew that has ever sat in this office. For people to
say that I am anti-Israel, or, even worse, anti-Semitic, it hurts.’
Boo. Hoo. If you don't expect any appreciation, you'll never be disappointed. Obama seems to be disappointed all the time.
But he's far from being a Jew. And what he thinks being a Jew means comes from
all the wrong places.
Bret Stephens reports that Obama supporter Peter Beinart says that we
have it all wrong. Obama's views on Israel came from a group of far Left
Chicago Jews, who “bred in Obama a specific, and subversive, vision of American Jewish identity and of the Jewish state” (Hat Tip: Herb G). (For those who - like me - do not have online access to the Wall Street Journal, you can find the full article here).
At
the center of this coterie, Mr. Beinart explains, was a Chicago rabbi
named Arnold Jacob Wolf. In 1969, Wolf staged a synagogue protest in
favor of Black Panther Bobby Seale. In the early 1970s, he founded an
organization that met with Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation
Organization—this being some 20 years before Arafat officially renounced
terrorism. In the early 1990s, Wolf denounced the construction of the
Holocaust Museum in Washington.
And, in 1996, the rabbi “was one
of [Mr. Obama's] earliest and most prominent supporters” when he ran for
the Illinois state Senate. Wolf later described Mr. Obama’s views on
Israel as “on the line of Peace Now”—an organization with a long history
of blaming Israel for the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Mr. Obama had
other Jewish mentors, too, according to Mr. Beinart. One was Bettylu
Saltzman, whose father, developer Philip Klutznick, had joined Wolf in
“his break with the Israeli government in the 1970s.” Ms. Saltzman,
writes Mr. Beinart, “still seethes with hostility toward the mainstream
Jewish groups” and later became active in left-wing Jewish political
groups like J Street. Among other things, it was she who “organized the
rally against the Iraq War where Obama proclaimed his opposition to an
American invasion.”
Ms. Saltzman also introduced Mr. Obama to
David Axelrod, himself a longtime donor to a group called the New Israel
Fund. For a flavor of the NIF’s world view, a WikiLeaks cable from 2010
noted that an NIF associate director told U.S. embassy officials in Tel
Aviv that “the disappearance of a Jewish state would not be the tragedy
that Israelis fear since it would become more democratic.”
What I have to wonder about is the source for the David Axelrod quote and the others (Martin Indyk, Dan Shapiro). This is Eliyahu Berkowitz's opener to the article:
In advance of an exclusive interview with President Barack Obama,
Channel 2’s Ilana Dayan interviewed the people who were most close to
the president in the past years, finding out what happened to the
US-Israel relationship and what was really said behind closed doors.
And then she went around discussing it? This wasn't on background or off the record? You don't think that the White House planted some things it wanted to get out there with the
generally sympathetic Yonit Levy and asked her to make sure they made the news in Israel, do you?
Here's Levy's
2010 interview with King Hussein. And here's a
summary of her 2013 interview with him. Hmmm. It sounds like she's a little beholden to The One.
Labels: Barack Hussein Obama, Channel 2, Dan Shapiro, Martin Indyk, Yonit Levy
How Israel's media manipulate the public
One of the things that took a lot of getting used to when I came on aliya was the fact that the 'news' pages here often read like the opinion pages. The same is true in the broadcast media as well: As Caroline Glick points out,
'Questions' are really arguments.
Last Monday Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz gave an interview to Channel 2's news anchor Yonit Levy during the prime-time news broadcast. Levy began the interview with a revealing "question."
Oozing professional probity, Levy said, "I assume you came here armed with wonderful data about the drop in unemployment and rising economic growth, but I want to ask you, Mr. Steinitz if for all your data you've forgotten the people, you've forgotten an entire class of working people who can't live?"
Not that she has an opinion.
People tell me that in Europe the news pages also read like opinion pages and that it is also becoming increasingly so in the United States. Well, maybe. But the difference here is the licensing process. It's
almost impossible to get a license here to broadcast anything other than the Leftist line. Remember
Arutz Sheva?
It's not like the Netanyahu government can easily change this situation. If they try to give licenses to others, they will be faced with a hostile broadcast media that will protect itself with everything in its power. Especially the airwaves. Here are some of their past 'accomplishments' (from the first link).
The media's manipulation of the public in the service of their political agenda is nothing new. For the past two decades every disastrous strategic initiative Israel has adopted was the product of massive media campaigns.
In 1993 the media rallied unanimously behind the Rabin-Peres government's decision to embrace the PLO and give Yasser Arafat and his terrorist armies land, political legitimacy, guns, and money. The more than one million Israelis who actively participated in demonstrations against this disastrous decision in subsequent years were demonized as the Israeli equivalent of Arab terrorists and potential assassins.
In 1997, when a handful of European Union financed activists formed the Four Mothers organization calling for the IDF to surrender southern Lebanon to Hezbollah, the media heralded the group as a "true grassroots movement."
The media blocked out all voices - including IDF commanders - that warned an IDF withdrawal would serve as a springboard for a Hezbollah takeover of Lebanon and lead to war. They demonized opponents of surrender as warmongers with the blood of IDF soldiers on their hands.
Had it not been for the media, the Four Mothers' campaign would have ended before it began. But due to media manipulation, within three years, a majority of Israelis became convinced that it made sense to surrender to Hezbollah.
In the lead-up to Israel's 2005 withdrawal from Gaza, the media again demonized the more than one million Israelis who actively opposed the plan. Voices warning of the dire strategic consequences of surrendering Gaza were silenced. Politicians who opposed the plan were attacked as warmongers. The media gave voice to those calling for open warfare against opponents of the withdrawal, and violence against the plan's opponents was openly encouraged by the media.
Since the Lebanon withdrawal, the media have repeatedly led campaigns demanding that Israel bow to Hezbollah and Hamas demands and release of hundreds of terrorists in exchange for live and dead Israeli hostages. Opponents of such releases are demonized as heartless extremists.
In the aftermath of the Second Lebanon War, reservists released from service began marching to Jerusalem demanding the resignations of then prime minister Ehud Olmert, then defense minister Amir Peretz and then IDF chief of general staff Dan Halutz for their failed leadership of the war. The media scuttled the reservists' protest by demonizing them as closet right wingers.
Indeed, the media protected both Ehud Olmert and his predecessor Ariel Sharon (thanks to the Gaza expulsion) like the
ethrog used on the holiday of Succoth.
So what are they hiding from you? Here's what you won't find out without reading the blogs. This is from the first link again.
For instance, Maariv bloggers Uri Redler and Rotem Sela researched the affiliation of all the speakers at the July 23rd rally in Tel Aviv. They found that out of 27 speakers, 21 are known leftist activists affiliated with Hadash, the communist party, with Meretz, with the New Israel Fund, with the Nationalist Left proto-party, and with the anarchists.
Redler and Sela also exposed that several "grassroots," leaders are in fact professional political operatives affiliated with communist politicians and radical pressure groups. For instance, an activist named Tzika Bashour announced on Facebook that he would begin a general strike on August 1. Yediot Ahronot and Ynet covered his move as an authentic call of distress by an Average Joe.
The papers failed to mention that Bashour is a public relations executive who ran communist MK Dov Hanin's campaign for the Tel Aviv mayoralty.
Read the whole thing.
By the way. for those of you with children, the hardest part is teaching them to read critically and not to take everything they see in the newspapers here as Torah from Heaven. It's not.
Labels: Caroline Glick, housing crisis, Israeli economy, Israeli taxes, mainstream media, Yonit Levy
