Obama meets with some of Israel's most radical Leftists

He backed Isaac Herzog and Tzippi Livni in the last election with an ad campaign that said that 'from the River to the Sea,' all of Israel belongs to the 'Palestinians.' But Livni and Herzog are far - very far - from being the most radical Leftist Israelis to whom Obama has granted succor. Daniel Greenfield has a rogue's gallery.

The Haaretz piece is another exercise in poisoning the well, but it does reveal some bits of interesting information. The article claims that Obama’s people, including Susan Rice, are refusing to meet with the Israeli ambassador. But they’re rather enthusiastic about meeting with assorted Israeli leftists.

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Looking into the records of the entry permits reveals that several heads of leftist Israeli not-for-profit groups also visited the White House during 2014. At the end of October there was a visit by the head of the Geneva Initiative group, Gadi Baltiansky, followed the next day by a visit by the head of Friends of the Earth Gidon Bromberg. They met separately with Maher Bitar, director of Israeli-Palestinian affairs at the White House.

On December 2, left-wing activist Danny Zeidman, whose main interest is problems related to Jerusalem, met with adviser Gordon. On December 9, attorney Michael Sfard from the Yesh Din human rights group, met NSC Mideast adviser Lempert.

Those are understated descriptions.

Zeidman is with Ir Amim, a radical left-wing group fighting against the Jewish presence in Jerusalem. It gets its funding from the EU and George Soros.

An Ir Amim blog entry in the Huffington Post (April 27, 2010), appeals to the United States government to, “Threaten [Israel] with severing diplomatic ties.”

And apparently Ir Amim is much closer to the White House than anyone thought.

Yesh Din is another anti-Israel lefty group funded by the EU and George Soros.

According to Emily Schaeffer, a lawyer on Yesh Din’s legal team, “Yesh Din was founded to use law as a tool to fight the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories.”

Victor Davis Hansen would tell you that coordinating strategy with groups like Ir Amim and Yesh Din - which are very far from any type of Israeli consensus - is something that Obama does purposefully and as a matter of course.

But, in fact, there is a predictable pattern to Obama’s foreign policy. The president has an adolescent, romantic view of professed revolutionary societies and anti-Western poseurs — and of his own ability uniquely to reach out and win them over. In the most superficial sense, Obama demonstrates his empathy for supposedly revolutionary figures of the non-Western world through gratuitous, often silly remarks about Christianity and Western colonial excesses, past and present. He apologizes with talk of our “own dark periods” and warns of past U.S. “dictating”; he contextualizes; he ankle-bites the very culture he grew up and thrived in, as if he can unapologetically and without guilt enjoy the West’s largesse only by deriding its history and values. 

In lieu of reading or speaking a foreign language, or knowing much about geography (Austrians speak Austrian, the death camps were Polish, the Indian Ocean Maldives are the politically correct name of the Falklands, cities along the U.S. Atlantic Coast are Gulf ports, etc.), Obama adopts, in the manner of a with-it English professor, hokey accentuation to suggest an in-the-know fides anytime he refers to the Taliban, Pakistan, or Teheran. Reminiscent of college naïfs with dorm-room posters of Che Guevara, Obama mythologizes about the underappreciated multicultural “Other” that did everything from fuel the Western Renaissance and Enlightenment to critique Christian excesses during the Inquisition. In truth, what he delivers is only a smoother and more refined version of Al Sharpton’s incoherent historical riff on “astrology” and “Greek homos.” Obama refuses to concede that Islam can become a catalyst for radical killers and terrorists, and he has a starry-eyed crush on those who strike anti-Western poses and have turned their societies upside down on behalf of the proverbial people. 

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For Obama, in the struggle between the Palestinian Authority and Israel, Israel is a Westernized colonial construct and a proponent of Western neo-liberal capitalism. The PA and Hamas, in contrast, are seen both as the downtrodden in need of community-organizing help and as authentic peoples whose miseries are not self-induced and the wages of tribalism, statism, autocracy, fundamentalism, misogyny, and anti-Semitism, but rather the results of Israeli occupation, colonialism, and imperialism. Obama may not articulate this publicly, but these are the assumptions that explain his periodic blasts against Netanyahu and his silence about the autocratic Palestinian Authority and the murderous Hamas. 

In such a landscape, the current Iranian talks make perfect sense. Obama was in no mood in the spring of 2009 to vocally support a million, pro-Western Iranian dissidents who took to the streets in anger over the theocracy’s rigged elections, calling for transparency and human rights. He snubbed them as if they were neoconservative democracy zealots. In his eyes, their false consciousness did not allow them to fully appreciate their own suffering at the hands of past American imperialists. In Obama’s worldview, the Iranian mullahs came to power through revolution and were thus far more authentic anti-Western radicals, with whom only someone like Obama — prepped by the Harvard Law Review, Chicago organizing, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s pulpit, and the most liberal voting record during a brief stint in the U.S. Senate — could empathize and negotiate. Why would Iranian idealists and democrats be foolish enough to spoil Obama’s unique diplomatic gymnastics? 

Traditional analyses deconstruct the Obama administration’s negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program and are aghast at the naïveté — no stop to ongoing uranium enrichment, no open or surprise inspections, no conditions to be met before sanctions are scaled back, no prohibitions against the marriage of nuclear-weapon technology and intercontinental-missile development. 

But that is to misunderstand the Obama worldview. He is less worried about a nuclear Iran and what it will do to a mostly pro-Western Gulf or Israel, or to other traditional U.S. interests, than about the difficulties he faces in bringing Iran back into the family of nations as an authentic revolutionary force that will school the West on regional justice. (“There’s incredible talent and resources and sophistication inside of Iran, and it would be a very successful regional power that was also abiding by international norms and international rules, and that would be good for everybody.”) Iran will assume its natural revolutionary role as regional power broker in the Middle East; and, almost alone, it is not beholden to any Western power. 

In some sense, Obama views the rest of the world in the same way as he views America: a rigged order in which the oppressed who speak truth to power are systematically mischaracterized and alienated — and in need of an empathetic voice on the side of overdue revolutionary accounting.

That's why he's meeting with the likes of Daniel Seidemann and Emily Schaeffer, while refusing to meet with Israel's Ambassador to the United States, Ron Dermer. The sooner Israelis recognize that this is Obama's view of the world - and that it's not representative of the United States in general - the sooner the harmful hysteria over 'our strained relations with the United States' will die down.