Obama, not Israel, needs to Pause,
For Some VERY Serious Self-Reflection,
As a young inexperienced intellectual Pet,
Of academics rather than of historic Reason,
But I suppose the Jews shouldn’t be Surprised,
By a non-combatant with a name of Barack Obama,
Separated by Barack’s genuine ARABIC name Hussein!
http://www.tribulationperiod.com/
DARDANELLE MBC
The Torah is referred to in Excerpt 2 from the Jerusalem Post so I am including the description of it in the three paragraphs which follow. The Rabbi refers to Torah as the document giving the Jews the right to settle anywhere they want in Israel, which indeed it does.
The following Excerpts are from Wikipedia:
The term “Torah,” (“learning” or “instruction,” sometimes translated as ” Law”
), refers either to the Five Books of Moses (or Pentateuch) or to the entirety of Judaism’s founding legal and ethical religious texts.
The Torah is the most holy of the sacred writings in Judaism. It is the first of three sections in the Tanakh (Hebrew Bible), the founding religious document of Judaism, and is divided into five books, whose English names are Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy,.
Outside of its central significance in Judaism, the Torah is accepted by Christianity as part of the Bible, comprising the first five books of the Old Testament.
Begin Excerpt 1 from the Jerusalem Post
A pause for serious self-reflection
July 19, 2009
Jonathan Tobin , THE JERUSALEM POST
When US President Barack Obama met with 15 representatives of American Jewish organizations on July 13, Haaretz reported that he told them that he wanted to help Israel achieve peace but that if they were to benefit from his well-intentioned counsel, Israelis must “engage in serious self-reflection.” The breathtaking condescension toward the Jewish state that this remark betrays, as well as the implicit dismissal of the last 16 years of Middle East history, says a lot about Obama and the direction in which American foreign policy is heading.
The fact that Israel has already gone through several periods of serious self-reflection and made costly sacrifices in terms not only of territory but in blood has no significance for the president. Here a just a few items that the president seems to think don’t matter in assessing the situation: The failure of a generation of peacemaking including the Oslo Accords and the successor agreements associated with that process, the 2000 Camp David summit, the second intifada, the withdrawal from Gaza, the subsequent use of that territory as a terror base and the failed attempt just last year to get the Palestinian Authority to take yes for an answer on statehood for its people.
All have apparently been swept down the White House memory hole. In the age of Obama, like a fundamentalist religion that dates all events as being either before or after a divine revelation, that which occurred prior to his election is meaningless by definition.
Rather than play down his penchant for quarreling with Israel, Obama is proud of it. Indeed, he asserts that such conduct is actually a virtue, since his hammering of Israel is merely “honest talk” that should be interpreted as the highest form of friendship.
Obama’s obsession with picking a fight
about growth in Jewish settlements in the territories is a classic misdirection play. The US had already agreed that calls for settlement freezes couldn’t apply to those communities that it had acknowledged Israel would keep in any peace agreement, let alone in Jerusalem. But Obama has repudiated that pledge partly out of his determination that he must invalidate everything his predecessor did, and partly because settlements are a useful cudgel with which beat Binyamin Netanyahu and the rest of the government Israelis elected only a few months after Obama’s own victory.
EVEN MORE important, the entire premise upon which his demand for Israeli reflection is based is false. So long as both the supposedly more moderate Palestinian Authority and the extremist Hamas movement that governs Gaza have no interest in peace on even the most generous terms that Jerusalem can offer – a detail upon which the PA’s leaders have been quite explicit – Obama’s pressure ploy is pointless.
Though Obama speaks to Jewish groups of equal pressure on the Arabs, everything that the administration has done and said in its short time in office makes it clear that the president’s sole target is the government in Jerusalem, not the terror
ists running Gaza or the corrupt Fatah functionaries in Ramallah.
Taken together with his appeasement of the Arab and Muslim world as reflected in his Cairo speech and a feckless policy of engagement on Iran that continues to extend legitimacy to a regime that has already forfeited its credibility with its own people, one would think that Obama would be in trouble with his Jewish supporters. Though there have been rumblings from some Jewish leaders that expressed worries about Obama’s attitude to Israel, the passive response to the downgrading of the alliance with Israel cannot be denied.
There are those who believe that the continued support for Obama can be traced to a lack of enthusiasm on the part of most American Jews for Israel’s current government and settlements, though others go so far as to say that it also shows a general lack of interest in, let alone support for Israel, among liberal Jews.
It is true that unlike the Israeli Left which has been completely marginalized by the Palestinians’ rejection of peace, the Jewish Left in the US is currently riding high. The spectacle of the small J Street lobby – a group that exposed its extreme nature last December when it opposed Israeli military efforts to stop missile attacks on its southern towns from Gaza – strutting into the White House alongside representatives of large mainstream groups illustrates the new political reality of Washington in 2009.
But the overwhelming majority of American Jews who voted for Obama last year did not back him because they anticipated that he would pick pointless fights with Israel to advance a peace process that Palestinians scorn.
Most did so because they are partisan Democrats and sh
are his views on domestic issues.
But there is no way that he would have won as much as three-quarters of the Jewish vote had not most believed him when he claimed he was a supporter of Israel. Contrary to the boasts of the left and the fears of the right, most Jewish Democrats still care deeply about Israel.
IN RESPONSE to writers like myself who have called for Democrats to speak truth to power and hold Obama accountable for his policies, some of those who vouched for Obama during last year’s campaign have said that the president’s offenses are not yet egregious enough to warrant a rebuke. Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz, a man whose long and honorable record of support for Israel is beyond question, attempted to defend Obama’s positions in a recent op-ed in The Wall Street Journal and then later in responses to critiques of it. He continues to believe that having a popular liberal Democratic president who claims to be a supporter of Israel is good for the Jews even if some of his policies are open to question. But Dershowitz’s half-hearted apologias betray a worry that perhaps he was fooled by the president’s campaign promises.
Jewish Democrats don’t have to jump to the Republicans. If, as Dershowitz avows, pro-Israel Democrats have influence on the administration, then let them use it before things get even worse. It is worth recalling that in 2002, when statements by secretary of state Colin Powell made it appear as if a Republican administration was taking a similarly “evenhanded” approach to Israel’s attempts to defend itself against a Palestinian campaign of suicide attacks, conservative evangelicals were not slow to act. This group, as integral to George W. Bush’s coalition as Jews are to Obama’s, deluged the White House with calls for strong support for Israel and got results.
Had a Republican done and said the same things that Obama has in the last six months who can doubt that he and other Democrats would be demanding that Jewish Republicans repudiate their party’s leader? The question remains what will be the tipping point for Jewish Democrats at which it will be impossible for them to go on pretending that they did not elect the most hostile president to Israel since the first George Bush? If the current trend continues without a strong negative reaction from Jewish Democrats who raised money for Obama and voted for him, then we are entitled to ask why they are either silent or rationalizing a policy that they know is wrong.
The writer is executive editor of Commentary magazine and a contributor to its blog Contentions at:
www.commentarymagazine.com. jtobin@commentarymagazine.com
Begin Excerpt 2 from the Jerusalem Post
‘US settlement policy contravenes Torah’
July 20, 2009
Matthew Wagner, THE JERUSALEM POST
In his first public declaration on Jewish settlements in Judea and Samaria, Chief Sephardi Rabbi Shlomo Amar called this week on American Jews to explain to the Obama administration the religious obligation of every Jew to live in every part of the Land of Israel.
In a letter addressed to American rabbinical organizations and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations that was obtained by The Jerusalem Post, Amar wrote that “the Torah commands the Jewish people to live in Israel. And we hear that the US is putting pressure on the Israeli government to prevent Jews from living or building their homes in large parts of the Land of Israel.
“This is being done at a time when every person is allowed to live wherever he wishes to live in every area of the world, while here in Israel [Americans] want to create a [Palestinian] state in which it will be prohibited for Jews to live.
And even expanding existing settlements is prohibited.
“We ask you to take advantage of your strength and power to influence the authorities in the US, that they should examine the issue with truly democratic criteria and to take into consideration the Torah and the Halacha that obligate Jews to settle everywhere.”
Amar wrote that he was not speaking from a political or diplomatic point of view, rather solely from a religious point of view.
The idea to write the letter to American Jews was initiated by Rabbi Sholom Gold, founding rabbi of Zichron Yosef Synagogue in Jerusalem’ s Har Nof neighborhood.
Gold spoke on Shabbat before Amar and other rabbis who had gathered at Kfar Giladi for a rabbinical conference sponsored by the Ariel Institute.
Gold spoke of how it was unjust to turn areas of the Land of Israel Judenrein – a Nazi term for “cleansed of Jews.”
Gold’s speech aroused a strong wave of agreement among the rabbis, including Amar, who resolved to draft a letter after Shabbat.
“The American pressure is extremely disconcerting,” said Gold, in a telephone interview. “The point of the letter is to use the influence of rabbis and leaders in the US to ease the terrible pressure being put on Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East. It is unfair and unwise.”
Oded Weiner, director-general of the Chief Rabbinate, who signed the letter along with Gold and other rabbis, sent it the Presidents’ Conference, the Orthodox Union, Young Israel and other Jewish organizations in the US.
Chief Rabbi of Haifa She’ar Yashuv Cohen said that preventing Jews from settling in the Land of Israel went against a long, illustrious history of famous rabbis settling here.
“Jews should be allowed to exercise their religious right to settle wherever they want in Israel,” Cohen said in an interview on Radio Kol Chai.
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