By Ben Shapiro
Wednesday, December 28, 2016
Barack Obama has done his best for nearly eight years to
undermine the state of Israel. He’s signed a treaty that enshrines an Iranian
path to a nuclear weapon while funding their global terrorist activities to the
tune of tens of billions of dollars. He’s repeatedly undercut Israel’s image on
the world stage, labeling Israel a mere outgrowth of the Holocaust and
suggesting that Israeli intransigence stands as the chief obstacle to peace.
He’s ushered Benjamin Netanyahu out the side door of the White House, attempted
to undercut the prime minister’s speech before Congress, and then deployed an
election team to Israel to try to defeat him in an election. Obama has tried to
cut weapons shipments to Israel in the middle of a war against terrorists,
forced Israel to apologize for stopping weapons shipments to Hamas terrorists,
and funded the Palestinian terrorist unity government with American taxpayer
dollars.
Nonetheless, Israel has survived.
Actually, Israel has thrived.
It’s thrived, in part, because Obama’s absolute
incompetence has created an alliance of convenience between Israel and its
erstwhile enemies. Saudi Arabia is more fearful of a nuclear Iran than of
Israel; Egypt worries more about the Muslim Brotherhood than about Israel;
Jordan frets over the Palestinians more than it does over Israel. Even the
Palestinian Authority is more concerned about Hamas and ISIS than about Israel.
That means that there’s been very little pressure on
Israel to make concessions to Palestinian terrorists in recent years.
Until now.
Obama’s animus for the state of Israel stretches beyond
the typical internationalist leftist view of Israel as a colonialist outpost, a
cancer growing in the heart of the Muslim Middle East. Most internationalist
leftists think that Israel is the cause of Muslim ire, that if Israel were to
disappear, suddenly the Muslim lands surrounding it would view the rest of the
world with fresh, dewy eyes. This is the same general philosophy that blames
the West for the problem of Islamic violence, that suggests that income
maldistribution breeds discontent that in turn breeds terrorism.
Obama may think that, but that’s not what drives him.
Something deeper drives Obama when it comes to Israel.
Why else would he spend the last few weeks of his presidency throwing gasoline
on Israel and then lighting a match?
Some might suggest ideological kinship with Islam. Obama
isn’t a Muslim, of course, but he has bragged often and loudly about his
heartfelt connection to the religion — and Muslims the world over, by polling
data, see Israel as the chief threat to global peace. There are points of
commonality between Obama’s philosophy and that of Muslim hardliners: Both see
the Crusades as the instigation of the Islamic world’s war on the West; both
believe that Israel has destroyed Muslim solidarity in the Middle East; both
attribute democratic feeling to Islamist movements.
Or perhaps even that explanation is insufficient: It
doesn’t tell us why Obama is so eager to hand over control of Middle Eastern
policy to Vladimir Putin and Russia, for example.
Here’s the most plausible explanation: Obama despises
Israel because at root, Obama despises the traditional Judeo-Christian
underpinning of Western civilization. He breaks down Bible believers into two
categories: fools and liars. The fools are the “bitter clingers,” the idiot
masses who fall into racism and xenophobia and Bible jabber because they’re
poor and stupid. The liars are the self-interested characters who want to do
what they want to do while citing the Bible for their support.
Real Christians
are leftists — as Obama said in 2006, “I believed and still believe in the
power of the African-American religious tradition to spur social change. . . .
The black church understands in an intimate way the biblical call to feed the
hungry and clothe the naked and challenge powers and principalities.”
Obama, then, is a religious leftist. He prefers a form of
Christianity that rejects biblical centrality and that replaces the Bible with
leftism at its heart. It’s not a coincidence that Obama attended Jeremiah
Wright’s church for two decades. Wright preached hatred against Israel
throughout his tenure, calling it an “apartheid” state and labeling all
settlements “illegally occupied territories.” He labeled Jesus “a Palestinian”
and argued that “the Palestinian people have had the Europeans come and take
their country. . . . The youth in Ferguson and the youth in Palestine have
united together to remind us that the dots need to be connected.”
Obama strongly mirrors that language himself, complaining
about the “desperation and disorder of the powerless, how it twists the lives
of children on the streets of Jakarta or Nairobi in much the same way as it
does the lives of children on Chicago’s South Side.” To Obama, Bible believers
who utilize religion as an excuse to cover for the real class oppression are merely cynical manipulators. You can take
Obama out of Jeremiah Wright’s church, but you can’t take Jeremiah Wright’s
church out of Obama.
And what is the ultimate
repository of such manipulation of religion? The Jewish state. The Jews of
Israel, Obama believes, are aggressors, using biblical writ as an excuse for
oppression, hiding behind the Bible when it’s really naked self-interest at
work. That’s why Obama stated at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial in Japan that “no
religion has been spared from believers who have claimed their faith as a
license to kill. . . . How easily we learn to justify violence in the name of
some higher cause.”
To Obama, that’s what the Jews of Israel do. Because
their control over Israel is inherently connected to biblical mandate, Obama
must oppose them. He must side instead with a religion of social justice, not a
religion of biblical principle.
That means rejecting Jewish Jerusalem. That means
rewriting the Bible, that document of sadism and oppression, to make it over
into The Book of Obama. That means Israel must pay for the sin of worshiping
its God over the god of warmed-over, amoral redistributionism.
Obama’s likely to be disappointed. The Jews have been
exiled from Jerusalem several times. Never again.
No comments:
Post a Comment