Want to learn a little bit about the history of the Jews? You’re in luck: Sit down and listen, because Professor Obama’s class is in session.
Speaking in front of a sold-out arena in Belfast earlier this month, the former president delivered a brief history of time, justice, and everything in between.
“The fact is that the Jewish people, for millennia, were oppressed, discriminated against, killed,” Barack Obama mused. “Europe was responsible for much of it. They understandably sought a refuge. That is undeniable. What is also undeniable is that they took land off people and they were excessive. And those people understandably said, ‘This is injustice and I want my land back.’”
Missing from this wildly ignorant quote are the facts that are actually undeniable, like that inconvenient truth about the Jews being the indigenous people of the Land of Israel, an assertion supported not only by the Torah but also by centuries of scientific and archeological discoveries.
Or those awkward years, in the 1930s and 1940s, in which the Arabs consistently rejected international efforts to share the much too promised land, reacting to Israel’s declaration of independence by launching a genocidal war to annihilate their Jewish neighbours.
Or the record of the past two decades, showing Israel offering concessions and the Palestinians responding with fresh, murderous waves.
Don’t confuse Professor Obama with any of the above, though. Like the finest of madmen and zealots, his world view remains admiringly impervious to facts. The man who, as Commander in Chief, moseyed over to Cairo and delivered a speech that never once mentioned terrorism while repeatedly acknowledging America’s own faults, flaws, and wrongdoings, is still at it. The ex-president whose vision of the world was one with a thriving Iran and a sedated Israel dreams on.
“If the attitude of Israel is, now that we are the strongest, the most technologically advanced in the region, then our security will depend on us simply doing whatever we need and taking whatever we want, and not making any concessions to anyone, that may work short-term,” Obama thundered on in Dublin. “But you have ceded moral ground if that is the position you take.”
It’s hard to ask for a more succinct summary of the late liberal viewpoint, the one everywhere these days operatically collapsing before our very eyes. It’s a viewpoint that former Harvard professor Ruth Wisse, perhaps our finest living thinker, captured well decades ago in a short but prophetic book about liberalism’s betray of the Jews. “Liberals,” Wisse observed, “trust that all human problems are amenable to negotiated solutions, that all people are united in a spirit of brotherhood, and that history itself is a record of progress. They detest the use of force, not only for the damage it causes but because by admitting the limits of reason it throws humankind back to a more primitive stage of civilisation.”
What, then, to do when genocidal Islamists rise up and attempt, again and again and again, to violently destroy the Jews? “In becoming the target of the most determined aggressors, Wisse wrote, the Jew “unwittingly aggresses against the liberal faith. Because his enemy wants his extinction, he becomes an affront to those who insist on tolerance and pacification. The hatred that Jews inspire among their enemies – for compelling political reasons – reminds liberals that enmity is real and that it has great generative energy. No one is grateful to the Jews for this reminder.” Barack Obama, we were reminded again this week, being no exception.
But it is we who should be grateful, because Obama, still the de facto kingmaker of the Democrat Party, gave us this week not so much a reflection on the past as a prognosis for the future. Anyone wondering what role, if any, Jews may be awarded in the Democrats’ likely return to power needn’t wonder any longer. The problem with the Jews, Professor Obama bluntly explained, wasn’t their support for this Israeli government or that, or their lack of faith in the eventual success of “the peace process.” In fact, the problem with the Jews isn’t earthly at all; it is a problem of faith.
To believe, like the Jews, in what the late, great Rabbi Jonathan Sacks called “the dignity of difference” is to reject the prevalent progressive attempt to see all talk of difference as inherently racist, sexist, or otherwise discriminatory. To believe, like the Jews, that the only moral and practical solution to a jihadi campaign of death and destruction is to fight evil with all your might is to reject the prevalent progressive dogma that reconciliation is always the answer, no matter what monster lies at the other end of the conflict. To believe, like the Jews, the faith, family, and nation are the basic building blocks of a good and righteous civilisation is to reject the prevalent progressive creed calling for radical individualism, open borders, and global comity.
In Belfast, then, Obama was as clear as anyone could’ve been, stating with his trademark eloquence that the future Democrats are imagining has no room for Jews who wish to remain in any way discernibly Jewish. Only those willing to rewrite their history and forfeit their future will be welcome.
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