Obama, the Jews, the Muslims, and Us
by Michael Ledeen – May 24, 2015
I don’t believe that any other American president has spent so much time talking to and about Jews as Obama. It all began in the very first months of his presidency—in August, 2009–when he called 1000 rabbis, lobbying for support for Obamacare. It was a full month before the High Holy Days, when Jews pray for a year of life and good health, and the president remarked that “we are God’s partners in matters of life and death.”
That was a considerable misstatement, for in these matters, Jews are supplicants, not partners. Two months earlier, Obama had similarly distorted the nature of Zionism. In his speech to the Muslim world in Cairo, he maintained that Israel’s right to exist derived from the oppression of Jews for many centuries. But Zionist leaders always insisted that modern Israel’s legitimacy rests on millennia of history: it is the restoration of a Jewish state that was promised by the Almighty to Abraham, entrusted to Moses, conquered by Joshua, and ruled by David, Solomon, and their successors.
So the president isn’t very well informed about Judaism or Zionism, yet he is forever lecturing Jews and Israelis about what is really best for them, as if he had some special insight. It is no accident that Obama is the only American president to write an introduction to the official military Jewish prayer book, prepared by US chaplains. All previous presidents had left such matters up to the rabbinate.
