“Our neglect of the Middle East Peace Process has spurred despair and fueled terrorism”
Barack Obama
My friend and Conclub contributor thompaine asked me to expand on certain concerns I had regarding Senator Obama’s outlook on Israel and the Middle East. Well my young friend will most assuredly learn that to ask me to expand is to invite a verbose reply at the minimum (mostly cutting and pasting and I had been working on something like this for awhile). In any event here is your messenger’s humble attempt to respond.
To understand Senator Obama’s view regarding Israel, and US interests in the Middle East as a whole, one would do themselves a favor by becoming familiar with Liberation Theology. A few good sources for doing that might start with its birth from mid-twentieth Catholic-Marxist thought, through the decades to one of its current branches - “Black” Liberation Theology. One could begin with the current Pope’s thoughts on it in the 1980’s, or Wikipedia if you must. If one has time Ron Rhodes has treatments on both the original Latin American Liberation Theology, and on the present form of “Black” Liberation Theology. There are those that might not agree with Ron’s religious views; but only a fool would argue with his scholarship. You may want to go to the advocates of this theology - Liberation Theology Resources (they even say Ron does good work.) Let me give you a quote from the father of Black Liberation Theology today in America…
Black theology refuses to accept a God who is not identified totally with the goals of the black community. If God is not for us and against white people, then he is a murderer, and we had better kill him. The task of black theology is to kill Gods who do not belong to the black community. . . . Black theology will accept only the love of God which participates in the destruction of the white enemy. What we need is the divine love as expressed in Black Power, which is the power of black people to destroy their oppressors here and now by any means at their disposal. Unless God is participating in this holy activity, we must reject his love.
It is important to note that these Marxist-socialist views have influenced Senator Obama’s outlook. To believe they have not stretches credulity. He has a close twenty year association with Jeremiah Wright Junior whose church is based on Black Liberation Theology. Reverend Wright has an interesting take on Israel too…
The Israelis have illegally occupied Palestinian territories for almost 40 years now. It took a divestment campaign to wake the business community up concerning the South Africa issue. Divestment has now hit the table again as a strategy to wake the business community up and to wake Americans up concerning the injustice and the racism under which the Palestinians have lived because of Zionism.
Obama looks at Israel through the prism of the “struggle” of the Palestinian people who need our help to be liberated. This article by Ed Lasky:Barack Obama and Israel lays out the case for Obama’s intent to desert Israel in great detail. If one reads this article they will be well informed on the issue. Note the date of the piece, Lasky wrote this two months ago. His take on a statement of Obama’s is interesting…
Obama has also blamed that “our neglect of the Middle East Peace Process has spurred despair and fueled terrorism”implicitly blaming Israel for terrorism and a sign that a President Obama would pressure Israel. Obama seems to ignore the roles that schools play in the Middle East in the teaching of hatred; the roles of mosques and Imams in stoking terrorism; the glorification of violence and martyrdom in the media; the role of jihad in the Koran.
The most telling facts associated with Obama’s intent regarding Israel relate to who his advisers are, and in one case have been. Those advisers are Samantha Power, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Susan Rice and Robert O. Malley. Those names are enough to scare any supporter of Israel. You throw in Jimmy Carter and James Baker with them, who have been mentioned before by Susan Rice, and you just might have the Israelis planning preemptive strikes for their survival. In reality I believe they already have.
I posted a little note on Harvard professor Samantha Power a few weeks ago. In that post I linked to a very telling article on Power regarding Israelby Martin Kramer. I could just as easily have pointed to another article on the professor by Lasky: Samantha Power and Obama’s Foreign Policy Team. This woman who was once identified as a “senior foreign policy advisor” for Obama speculated that it might be necessary for the USA to invade Israel. She called for us to give the Palestinians additional billions in aid. Apparently so they can continue to purchase arms to use on Israel. She wants us, the USA, to put a security force in Israel to protect the Palestinian’s interests. Now pray tell me how that would work? If she could have kept her mouth shut regarding Senator Clinton she would have been a senior official in Obama’s administration. More regarding Power here, here, and here.
Zbigniew Brzezinski, that is a name that is not looked upon fondly by anyone with any sense regarding the Middle East, unless they place the Palestinians above the Israelis. The addition of the Z-man to Obama’s team even scares Martin Perez at TNR. Keep in mind how the Middle East was left at the end of the Carter Administration. Speaking of ‘chickens coming home to roost’, look what we are dealing with now due to Carter’s legacy. Ben Smith in his article at politico: Obama adviser worries Israel supporters puts it like this…
Still, people involved in Jewish and America-Israel politics across the political spectrum expressed surprise at Brzezinski’s high profile in the campaign. Indeed, the former national security adviser has been at odds with elements of the American Jewish community since the Carter administration.
“Brzezinski was a major obstacle to bridging the divisions between the president and the Jewish community,” said Mark Siegel, who was Carter’s Jewish liaison until resigning in 1978 in a dispute over the sale of fighter jets to Saudi Arabia. “I’m very, very surprised that someone would have him directly involved in a presidential campaign.”
Robert Malley - Mr. is he, or is he not, an adviser. Apparently he is acknowledged as one now by Obama. He is an extremely brilliant man who has devoted quite a bit of his time lately to revising recent history. The JP talks about him this way…
Robert O. Malley, another former Carter Administration diplomat and President Clinton’s special advisor on Arab-Israeli affairs, is an unabashed advocate for the Palestinians, co-authoring a spate of anti-Israel propaganda with former Arafat advisor, Hussein Agha, including a tract that blames Israel for the failure of the 2000 Camp David talks and another piece which blames the Bush Administration for continuing Israeli-Palestinian strife.
That brings us to John Kerry’s friend Susan Rice. Let us get Larry Johnson at No Quarters views on her…
During her time on the National Security Council, as the senior person responsible for giving the President policy options on Africa, Rice reprised the role of Nero fiddling while Rome burned. She sat by while more than one million Rwandans were butchered in a bloody genocide. She let the phone ring and declined to offer any answer that would have saved lives. And she is one of Barack’s key advisers.
Larry’s point is that she is the one that came up with…
…“Clinton hasn’t had to answer the phone at three o’clock in the morning and yet she attacked Barack Obama for not being ready,’’ Ms. Rice said. “They’re both not ready to have that 3 a.m. phone call.”
She is also the one that suggested to Kerry to put the foreign policy realist James Baker, and President “Israel practices apartheid” Carter, in positions of authority in a Kerry administration. Again the JP article…
And then there is Susan Rice, foreign policy advisor to the ill-fated John Kerry presidential campaign in 2004, where she concocted the idea of solving the Middle East problem by appointing none other than Jimmy Carter and James Baker as negotiators, an idea which was later repudiated by her own boss as being unbalanced against Israel.
Are you starting to see a pattern here my young friend? You couple these people’s outlook with Obama’s view that all present problems, foreign and domestic, are due to the oppression of the masses and you have more than just a small reason to pause. This is why it could be so dangerous for a global socialist like Obama to meet with some of these radical hardliners like Hugo Chavez and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. It is dangerous because meeting with them will tend to legitimize them, and because they will try to take advantage of his naivete like Khrushchev did with Kennedy. But more importantly it is dangerous because there is reason to believe that the Senator deep down sympathizes with their struggles.
The question is: Can America in this combustible era afford to make a foray into European style socialism? I am not sure that even the European socialists would be comfortable with the emasculated America the Illinois senator has in mind. We can survive another self interested left-wing Democrat president. Can we survive a 21st century wide-eyed, true believing leader of the world’s oppressed?
Senator Obama has incredible talent and is a brilliant man. His views are what scare me.
I will leave you with Marc Zell from the Jerusalem Post…
1)Obama openly advocates outreach toward and diplomatic engagement of Iran even though Iran has recently referred to Israel as a “filthy bacteria” and has repeatedly called for the annihilation of the Jewish State, including recent hints that this will be accomplished by a nuclear attack
2) “Nobody has suffered more than the Palestinian people.”
3)”[T]he creation of a wall [referring to Israel’s security fence] dividing the two nations is yet another example of the neglect of this [the Bush] Administration in brokering peace… .”
4)”I am opposed to the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other armchair, weekend warriors in the administration to shove their ideological agenda down our throat.” [note that only Jews are singled out despite the fact that the policies in question were promoted by the entire Administration]
5)”Reverend [Al] Sharpton is a voice for the voiceless, and a voice for the dispossessed. What [Reverend Sharpton’s] National Action Network has done is so important to change America, and it must be changed from the bottom up.” [National Action lead a protest against the Jewish owner of Freddy’s Fashion Mart in New York in which picketers, sometimes joined by Sharpton himself, repeatedly screamed epithets about “bloodsucking Jews” and “Jew bastards.”]
Obama was the only Democratic candidate who said the onus was on Israel to change its policies vis-à-vis the Palestinians in order to achieve peace.
The Presidency in this day and age is no place for a neophyte, however charismatic. Those of us Americans who live in the Jewish State clearly understand what is at stake and what kind of risk Obama poses to the region and the world. There is every reason to hope that our compatriots in the United States and friends of Israel and freedom generally would agree.
It is very much worth noting that my wife helps me out on post like this, from typing, to helping me the find words that no longer come to me. My brain struggles to formulate things into something coherent, she helps translate that struggle. She of course does not always agree with me. Posting on here is good therapy for me, mental and physical. In some ways God has blessed me so much.
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