Obama's Israel problem

I also expect that the Democratic party will abandon its historic sympathy for Israel, implying that the considerable continuity in U.S. policy toward the Jewish state is a thing of the past; in the future, it will lurch one way and the other, depending on which party controls the White House. Daniel Pipes, 2003.

Pipes' prediction hasn't come true--yet. But it's my belief that one day a majority of the Jewish electorate will wake up and realize that when they're voting Democratic, they're not voting no longer voting for Franklin D. Roosevelt.

The Republican Party's tough stand against terrorism will make the GOP increasingly attractive to Jewish voters, despite an idiotic statement by Ann Coulter, in the years ahead.

The Democrats specialize in pandering, and as they build their 21st century version of the Roosevelt coalition, Muslims are being welcomed into their "big tent." There is nothing wrong with that, but what of American-Israeli relations?

In the 2000 election, Al Gore got caught playing both sides of the issue of where the US embassy should be located--Tel Aviv or Jerusalem?

It was just a preview of what the Democrats can expect during this presidential campaign.

Senator John McCain says he is "proudly pro-American and pro-Israel." Will the Democratic candidate this fall, right now it looks like Barack Obama, say the same thing?

If you go by his Israel fact sheet, you might say he will.

But questions remain.

Let's start with Rashid Khalidi. Even when considering the extreme left-wing tilt of most college universities, Columbia University stands out as a bastion of radicalism.
This is the school that invited Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the man who says Israel will be wiped off the map, to speak there last year.

Khalidi is a slippery character, who dances around the truth when talking about terror groups like Hamas and Hezbollah.

Obama's first run for Congress was in 2000, he failed in his attempt to unseat Bobby Rush in Illinois' first congressional district. Khalidi, then living in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood, held a fundraiser for Obama at his home.

From Jewish Week:

Ali Abunimah, a Hyde Park Palestinian-American activist, said that until a few years ago, Obama was "quite frank that the U.S. needed to be more evenhanded, that it leaned too much toward Israel." It was vivid in his memory, said Abunimah, because "these were the kind of statements I'd never heard from a U.S. politician who seemed like he was going somewhere rather than at the end of his career."

In 2000, Abunimah recalled, Professor Rashid Khalidi, a leading Palestinian American advocate for a two-state solution and harsh critic of Israel, held a fundraiser in his home for Obama, embarked then on an ultimately unsuccessful bid for the House of Representatives. "He came with his wife," Abunimah said. "That's where I had a chance to really talk to him. It was an intimate setting. He convinced me he was very aware of the issues [and] critical of U.S. bias toward Israel and lack of sensitivity to Arabs. ... He was very supportive of U.S. pressure on Israel?"

Khalidi, now the Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies at Columbia University, and head of that school's Middle East Institute, declined to comment on Abunimah's recollections. But in an interview in Tuesday's Daily News, he said he hosted the fundraiser because he and Obama were friends while the two lived in Chicago. "He never came to us and said he would do anything in terms of Palestinians," Khalidi told the paper.

Nevertheless, one Hyde Park source close to Obama, speaking only on condition of anonymity, recalled, "He often expressed general sympathy for the Palestinians -- though I don't recall him ever saying anything publicly."

Not good. Oh, how much money was raised at the Khalidi fundraiser?

Then there is Obama's Trinity United Church of Christ and its controversial former pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. He may not be in charge of the church any more, but he'll still be around, and his presence will be felt. The Black Value System is still on the TUCC's web site.

Last year the Nation of Islam's Louis Farrakhan, a racist and anti-semite, was honored with a lifetime achievement award by Trinity United. To his credit, Obama did repudiate Farrakhan last month.

Wright regularly compares Israel to Apartheid-era South Africa, despite the fact that Palestinians living in Israel enjoy greater freedoms than their brethern living elsewhere in the Middle East. Yes, I'm well aware that Arabs living in the occupied territories greatly suffer, but after decades of leadership under the PLO, then Hamas, at some point reasonable people have to look at the Palestian leadership, the men who chose terror over compromise, as the source for the agony in Gaza and the West Bank. People like Wright and Khalidi fail to see that.

And finally, one of Barack Obmam's foreign policy advisers is Zbigniew Brzezinski, a long time critic of Israel. Yes, he has other advisers, but none of them were in Syria last week meeting with President Bashar al-Assad.

A lot of Jewish voters may not see past Obama's Israel problem.

H/T to No Quarter USA for the Khalidi information.

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