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Friday, March 29, 2024

Netanyahu Must Absolutely Make that Speech – Part I

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The author writes that, “As a U.S. Senator, Barack Obama immediately began laying the groundwork for running for President. It turned out that his experience as a community organizer — though mocked by his opponents — was valuable. He ran a good campaign against a remarkably weak Republican opponent.”

Bibi absolutely must make that speech.  I do not know whether it will do any good, whether it will change anything.  But he must make that speech to Congress.

We now have a President in the United States who has absolutely no comprehension as to how to deal with tyrants, dictators, bullies, and thugs.  Worse — much worse than that — is that this President does not know what he does not know.  He believes he is a genius, the smartest person in the room.  He surrounds himself with sycophants who tell him that he is the smartest person in the room.  Yes, history will clear it all up, recording him among the five least competent or qualified of all American presidents.  Possibly the least of all.

But the Jewish People in general — and the State of Israel in particular — cannot afford to wait for history to be published in paperback.

Barack Obama became President without ever governing, without ever encountering the real world of terror and dictatorship.  He lived a charmed life, albeit with the usual familial setbacks that come from a broken home.  He grew up in Hawaii.  He went to Columbia Universityas a transfer student.  He then went to Harvard Law School.  He will not authorize the release of his transcripts — not the courses he took, not the grades he got, not in college, not in law school.

At the law school he became president of Law Review. As someone who has been Chief Articles Editor of a great American law review, I know personally that one cannot attain such a position unless he or she produces a legal commentary of profound scholarly distinction, a published law review article (sometimes called a “Note” or a “Comment” when authored by a law student).  Obama is the only such person of whom I ever have known who rose to such a law review position — selected not based on grades, merely selected by peers — without having produced any published scholarship whatsoever.  In other words, he began life by learning how to leverage some special grace that persuaded people around him to open doors for him, allowing him opportunities that most other people obtain only after earning the opportunities by achievement.

In time, he ended up in Chicago as a community organizer.  Some propound a myth that he was a Constitutional scholar, a law school professor of distinction at University of Chicago Law School.  That is not true, and the record speaks for itself.  Rather, he taught courses a few times.  He was not tenured.  He produced no written scholarship.  He is not a scholar of the American Constitution.  I write this as someone who clerked for a brilliant United States Court of Appeals judge and as someone who practiced high-stakes law for more than a decade and has taught law as an adjunct professor for more than a decade.

He has enjoyed a grace of opportunities without achievements, opportunities that others have been able to attain only after they charted achievements.

He became a state legislator in Illinois.  He often voted for or against controversial measures that required courage and principle, simply casting his vote “Present, in attendance.”  When he sought the Democratic Party’s nomination to run for U.S. Senator from Illinois, he was an underdog running against a field that included multi-millionaire securities trader Blair Hull until a remarkable news story broke: Hull’s wife, going through a divorce, filed papers that the man she was divorcing — her husband, Obama’s opponent — often beat her and engaged in other domestic abuse.  Somehow these secret court filings ended up in the news, eradicating Hull’s electoral support, and Obama was nominated virtually by default to run against the popular Republican candidate, Jack Ryan.

During that Senatorial election, news somehow broke in the midst of the election campaign that the Ryan’s wife, also in the midst of divorcing, had filed secret papers in court that alleged that the man she was divorcing — her husband, Obama’s opponent — had forced her to engage in certain sexually aberrant behaviors.  Overnight, Jack Ryan was forced to withdraw from the election, and Obama skated in.  Somehow those sealed court papers had ended up in the newspapers.

As a U.S. Senator, Obama immediately began laying the groundwork for running for President.  It turned out that his experience as a community organizer — though mocked by his opponents — was valuable.  He ran a good campaign against a remarkably weak Republican opponent

John McCain, who never quite got a handle on how to debate Obama, and Obama was elected President.

Many who voted for Obama were excited by the prospect of electing America’s first Black president, marking an exciting historic end to America’s shameful and horrific centuries of enslaving Black people.  Barack Obama had become President of the United States without having experienced real danger, real life, without having demonstrated what he knew of foreign affairs or of dealing with dictators.  And soon thereafter, again without having done anything to justify such grace for which others have to strive through a lifetime of achievement to attain, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Having lived the life of grace — and it is hard to imagine that even half of this happened for him in his life if it were not so public (except for his college and law school transcripts) — he legitimately and understandably has evolved a sense that anything he touches will work out his way. And, indeed, his first few years as President further fed into that narrative, as he enjoyed a huge Democratic Party majority in both of America’s federal legislative chambers, the House of Representatives and the United States Senate.

However, through six years of his Presidency and his dismal record on domestic issues and foreign affairs, the American people have taken that all away from his political party: the Senate, the House, and control of three quarters of the country’s fifty states now are securely in Republican hands.

Convinced of his charm and ability to attain any end he desires simply by presenting himself, he proceeded to travel to Egypt to re-set America’s Middle East policy.  He was determined to effectuate a re-set of America’s relations with Vladimir Putin.  He turned against America’s historic allies in East Europe while reaching out to dictators like Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, the Castro government of Cuba, Putin, Assad in Syria, and even the Iranian mullahs.  When thousands were in the streets of Teheran, risking their lives and facing horrific tortures during the Green Revolution, he remained silent, persuaded that he had a better way to bring Iran into his orbit of grace.

It is imperative that Israelis — and everyone else — understand that Obama not only despises Netanyahu, as he has from Day One — but will despise any Israeli Prime Minister who builds in Jerusalem, who builds anywhere in Judea or Samaria, or who resists giving up land to Abbas and signing a peace agreement that Obama dictates.  He dictates to friends, and Obama sincerely believes a Mideast narrative that is popular among American left-wing ideologues and pseudo-intellectuals: that Israel is a White colonialist settler state, created and propped up by Western imperialism, aimed at suppressing an indigenous Third World population of victimized people who lived in that land long before Jews did, from time immemorial.

(To be Continued Next Week)

Rabbi Dov Fischer is author of General Sharon’s War Against Time Magazine (Steimatzky: 1985). His political commentaries have appeared on the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal, The Weekly Standard, National Review,  Los Angeles Times, and in other major American publications.

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