President Barack Obama last Monday met for the first time with leaders of selected Jewish organizations and leaks from the meeting now make one thing very clear. The only free country in the
This was the very first meeting with Jewish community's leaders. Earlier requests for an audience with major Jewish organizations had reportedly been ignored. Six months after taking office the president finally got around to issuing an invitation to stop the bleeding. Increasing numbers of Jews even among the overwhelming number who voted for Obama ¬ have been voicing serious concern about his real agenda.
The meeting, however, did not showcase the president's trademark engagement and dialogue routine. Instead, he decided to cherry pick his Jewish audience to include pro-Obama newcomers with little support in the mainstream Jewish world, such as
The growing alarm in the Jewish community was also something the White House was bent on covering up. They refused to put the meeting on the President's public schedule until it was outed. The White House demanded strict confidentiality and issued a terse couple of lines that it occurred when it was all over.
But there is no papering over the distressing reality that emerged. The president told his listeners that he preferred putting daylight between the
Evidently, unilateral disengagement from the Gaza Strip, 21 settlements and 9,000 residents counts for nothing. The Palestinian terrorist leadership and street have refused to accept a Jewish state for the past eight years (and the previous 53) because the
The president apparently believes that the Palestinians are more likely to end terrorism, incitement to violence and rampant antisemitism if the
During the meeting, the president repeatedly described his new policy in terms of one of Yasser Arafat's favorite mantras, "even-handedness." That's diplotalk for a moral equivalence between an Arab war against Jewish self-determination launched from the day of
The president promoted his strategy of putting hard public "pressure" on
Obama then claimed that the widespread perception of an anti-Israel agenda was all the media's fault because the media is only interested in a "man-bites-dog" story. When an administration sends a US ambassador back to Syria though it is still listed as a key state sponsor of terrorism, hosts terrorist kingpins pursuing Israel's annihilation, and was caught trying to acquire weapons of mass destruction, the story is far-fetched alright, but true.
The president joked that Al-Jazeera often airs pictures of him wearing a yarmulke at the Western Wall. Except the photo-op during the election campaign had been intended to fool a Jewish audience that is no longer amused.
Reports also quote the president as claiming
There is no doubt that the pressure on Israel from the Obama administration is going to get a lot worse, as the President told the group "there is a narrow window of opportunity for advancing the peace process." Everyone understood the threat. The narrow window is Obama's self-defined political ambitions bearing no relationship to the realities of the Middle East ¬or the welfare of either
Anne Bayefsky is a professor at
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