Questions For Israel’s Next Best Friend
Posted By Jonathan MarkROUTE 17: Questions For Israel’s Next Best Friend
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For all the interrogation of Barack Obama over his connections to either Islam or Christianity (his membership in a church whose pastor praised Farrakhan), why isn’t anyone asking Hillary Clinton about her membership in the United Methodist Church that recently announced it is divesting from Israel? And—same church, different pew—why is no one asking Pres. Bush about this, he being another proud United Methodist?
Why is Mitt Romney pressed on every nuance of Mormon history and theology, a church that isn’t on the warpath against Israel, but no one is pressing those political “friends of Israel” whose Methodist church has taken Israel to the woodshed? In the fashion of recent politics, Hillary has protested on numerous occassions that she is just as proud of her church as Christian Republicans are of theirs, and that she is more religious than folks think.
Why isn’t she on the griddle? After all, her experience includes being married to the man who had no idea that peace talks at Camp David 2000 could turn into the second intifadah. (Which is not to say, don’t get me wrong, that Bill Clinton wasn’t “the best friend Israel ever had,” as Jewish leaders assured me.)
More to the point on Obama, it’s easy for him to be asked about Farrakhan. He didn’t praise Farrakhan, his friend did. He never campaigned with Farrakhan, as Jesse Jackson once did. Obama can rightly say that he and Farrakhan never shared a table. But Obama did attend a fundraiser, when he was an Illinois legislator, hosted by Rashid Khalidi, now at Columbia University, one of the most notorious anti-Zionists on any American campus. Obama was photographed at that fundraiser sitting at the same table with Edward Said, another one of the most notorious anti-Semites when he was at Columbia, and a member of the pro-Arafat Palestinian National Council before his death in 2003.
What did Obama and Said talk about at that table? Why would Khalidi host a fundraiser for him? If these are the people Obama once called allies, why isn’t his switch to AIPAC-approved politics not seen as a cynical career-advancing flip-flop every bit as much as those flip-flops that other candidates have to answer for? I’d rather know about Obama’s history with Said and Khlaidi – choices that Obama made as an adult – rather than the religion of the father that Obama said goodbye to in childhood.
Too many Jewish leaders, and Jewish journalists for that matter, seem to be too concerned with demonstrating how tolerant we are; how Peter, Paul & Mary of us it would be to support a black president; how much better we are than the crank e-mailers; how we are such good Black-Jewish alliance types that we dare not press Obama for answers about a part of his past that actually might reveal his truest self.
Think about it. Obama is solidly on the left of every issue. It strains credulity that that on the singular topic of Israel he is suddenly not a leftist but Jabotinsky. I greatly admire Obama but, really, does this not seem a convenient campaign conversion, even if it flatters?
Rest assured, dear voter, whoever wins will be annointed by Jewish leaders as “the best friend Israel ever had.” I know. I can hear it already. I hear it about our president still. But my new best friends, Hillary and Barack, John and Mitt, have some questions still to be answered.