[Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News] The First Jewish President My... Tush (Michael Lumish)

Michael Lumish, of the Israel Thrives blog as well as a regular blogger at Times of Israel and Jews Down Under, continues his weekly column here at EoZ.

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In a recent piece for the Wall Street Journal we read this:

The 1988 Hamas Charter explicitly commits the Palestinian terror group to murdering Jews. Thanks to the formation this week of an interim government uniting Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, which the U.S. supports to the tune of more than $400 million a year, the American taxpayer may soon become an indirect party to that enterprise.

Oh, joy.


What can one say?

Not only is the United States government paying for the privilege of helping Jihadis kill Jews, but even Jewish "progressives" are going along with it because they seem incapable of removing their ideological blinders. I am convinced that if Barack Obama came on stage before a live international audience and sang Hatikva while pissing on an Israeli flag and kicking a Holocaust survivor in the head as part of a fun-loving interpretive dance, his American Jewish sycophants would still wonder to themselves how it is that we fail to support the guy.

Western Left diaspora Jews have simply got to face the fact that the Obama government is generally supportive of political Islam.  {Period.  Full stop.}  I understand that your average reader of the Elder of Ziyon already knows that, but therein lies the problem.  Political partisanship and ideological intransigence are disallowing great numbers of diaspora Jews from seeing what is before their very eyes.

If diaspora Jewry would simply wrap their brains around this basic concept, and acknowledge what it means, it would go a long way to healing the divisions within our community.

What it means is this:

Islam, as a political movement, is driving Christians out of the Middle East entirely, with the sole exception of Israel.  Islam, as a political movement, hangs Gay people from cranes in Iran.  Islam, as a political movement, shoves women into potato sacks and tells them it is Allah's love.  And Islam, as a political movement, calls for the murder of Jews wherever we may be found.

And this is what the Obama administration supports?

It is simply unfathomable that year after year, as the Obama administration bolstered the misnamed "Arab Spring" - which was, in fact, the rise of political Islam - our more naive progressive-left Jewish interlocutors kept telling us that Obama does not support political Islam even as he sent money and heavy weaponry to the Muslim Brotherhood, the parent organization of both Hamas and al-Qaeda.

How ideologically blinkered one must be, at this late date, to still not grasp the simple fact the president of the United States has no real problem with the rise of political Islam throughout the world and, as part of the historical record, encouraged it?

I have never in my life seen such determined and persistent political myopia.

In a May 19, 2011 speech billed as Obama's address to the "Arab World" following the widespread violence and rapes and riots and persecution of Christians throughout the region, he tells us.

There are times in the course of history when the actions of ordinary citizens spark movements for change because they speak to a longing for freedom that has been building up for years. In America, think of the defiance of those patriots in Boston who refused to pay taxes to a King, or the dignity of Rosa Parks as she sat courageously in her seat.

The "Arab Spring" was the rise of political Islam in the Middle East and this is what Obama compares the Civil Rights Movement to?  How is that for a kick in the head to Martin Luther King, Jr.?  The irony is profound and deep.  We have a president of the United States who would certainly not be the president of the United States were it not for the concerted effort of millions of Americans since the rise of Abolitionism.  This is an American president who came out of the progressive-left, which, itself owes much to the New Deal and to American socialism from the nineteenth century.  Yet he supports the most vicious and international and repressive political movement in the world today and receives applause from the very people that he harms.

And, make no mistake, supporting Hamas is a harm to the Jewish people everywhere.

The only real questions are why?  Why does Obama support political Islam while claiming to be opposed to al-Qaeda, as if al-Qaeda was the end-all and be-all of the movement to advance Sharia?  And why is it that western progressives, and western progressive Jews, go along with it and deny what should be absolutely obvious to any concerned observer?

Some people believe that Obama supports political Islam because he is a crypto-Muslim, but I do not think so. The man is a Christian with Muslim influences from his childhood.  If I was bigoted against African-American Christians with an Islamic heritage I would never have voted for the guy to begin with... yet I did.

{Go figure.}

The fact is, we cannot fight, or in any meaningful way, oppose Islam because Islam is 1.5 BILLION people.  And that, my friends, is a whole lot of people, which is precisely why they are winning the propaganda war in the west.  There cannot be enough hasbara in the world to counter the expression of the political tastes of 1.5 billion people.  From a practical aspect we cannot win such a fight and I do not even know what "winning" against Islam could possibly look like.  Whatever it might look like it would not be the least bit pleasant and the whole notion, promoted by some, that we must oppose Islam, in general, is a terrifically bad idea.

The reason that it is a terrifically bad idea is because it simply cannot succeed and any effort to do so would obviously alienate the kinds of secular Muslims that we need to cultivate and befriend.  There are 13 million Jews and something close to 1.5 billion Muslims in the world.

I have played a few poker hands in my life.  Who would you bet on?

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Posted By Elder of Ziyon to Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News at 6/08/2014 11:00:00 AM