Adiv Sterman, writing in the Times of Israel, tells us:
"our friends in Israel"?As part of the Obama administration’s current campaign to push the Iranian deal signed July 14 in Vienna, Kerry told an audience at the Council of Foreign Relations in New York on Friday that should Congress vote against the agreement, “our friends in Israel could actually wind up being more isolated, and more blamed.”
The statement was promptly rejected by the former Israeli ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren, now a member of the centrist Kulanu party.
“If American legislators reject the nuclear deal, they will do so exclusively on the basis of US interests. The threat of the secretary of state who, in the past, warned that Israel was in danger of becoming an apartheid state, cannot deter us from fulfilling our national duty to oppose this dangerous deal,” Oren said in a statement.
John Kerry has friends in Israel? This is rather difficult to imagine, actually, but I suppose that there must be one or two people in Israel who do not actively despise Barack Obama and John Kerry.
This administration is about as popular as a hunchbacked warthog with herpes in Israel... and that goes at least as much for the Arabs as the Jews, because both understand that in allowing Iranian nuclear weaponry it is enabling the potential holocaust of both people. It must also be remembered that Sunnis and Shias distrust one another almost as much as they distrust and despise Jews.
This is not the first time, by the way, that Kerry has made these kinds of veiled threats and the "isolation" of Israel is an ongoing theme with the Obama administration. Israel is constantly admonished by the U.S. administration in terms that I interpret as follows:
You guys better do as you are told or something bad could happen.
We are your best friends and we would not want to see you get hurt, so you better listen.
You will allow the murderers of Jews out of Israeli prisons.
Your leadership will apologize before the international community to those who seek you harm by supporting efforts to break the blockade of Gaza and, thus, allow-in weaponry against you.
You will not let your people build housing for themselves on the parts of your land where we disapprove of your presence.
We will arm your Iranian enemies with the world's most dangerous weapons and you will be quiet.
We will also flood the Iranian economy with one hundred and fifty billion dollars which they can use to bolster genocidally anti-Semitic organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah, but you will remain quiet.
When Arabs shoot rockets at your people you will sustain the suffering of your children without response because to do otherwise would constitute an act of aggression and a war crime.One of the memorable catch-phrases of the Obama administration is this notion of "leading from behind." This is a very real thing and Obama has perfected it in terms of Israel. In order to lead "from behind" one needs both the authority of position and the enthusiasm of those one is behind leading. Obama knows very well that both the EU and the UN are hungry for more sanctions and harassment of the lone, sole Jewish state. All Obama needs to do is remark about how displeased he is with the
At the same time, however - given Israel's economic, technical, and diplomatic relationships all around the world - Kerry's forebodings of "isolation" seem more like an attempt to play on Jewish fears more than anything else. The Jewish people in the Middle East are a people under siege. European Jewry is under siege, as well, because of the deterioration of Enlightenment values throughout that continent.
American, Canadian, and Australian Jews are doing well because of the strength of secular democracy within those countries. Nonetheless, the history of the Jewish people, as a whole, is that of a people under siege and, therefore, it is not difficult for powerful people, such as those from the Obama administration, to manipulate Jewish fears, which is precisely what they are doing.
Whenever the Obama administration starts making noises about Israeli "isolation" or the likelihood of Israel becoming a heinous "apartheid" state unless it does what it is told, these are veiled threats exploiting historically-based Jewish fears. It is a way for non-Jews with an agenda, like John Kerry, to use Jewish apprehensions, given our history, as a weapon against us. When people like Kerry claim that Israel is becoming, or already is, an "apartheid state" what they are saying is that like apartheid South Africa, it must be dismantled in favor of something else. In this case the "something else" is a 23rd Arab-Muslim Koranically-based dictatorship.
A direct threat, obviously, was the suggestion that, given Israel's refusal to sometimes do as told, the Obama administration may very well turn upon it at the United Nations.
As CNN reported after Netanyahu's recent victory at the polls:
Washington (CNN) The Obama administration's frustration with Benjamin Netanyahu is turning into outright hostility after the Israeli prime minister's commanding victory this week.There is no question, in my mind, at least, that the Obama administration is the most hostile American administration toward the Jewish State of Israel in the history of the United States. The reason that the Obama administration is hostile to Israel is not out of some form of direct anti-Semitism, but through the influence of post-colonial theory in the academe, which represents the very basis of Obama's political thinking.
Administration officials greeted his win with harsh words Wednesday and suggestions that the U.S. might scale back its support for Israel at the United Nations, a significant reversal in policy after years of vetoing resolutions damaging to Jerusalem.
A senior administration official said that Netanyahu's sharp tacks to the right before Tuesday's vote -- in which he ruled out the creation of a Palestinian state, a pillar of U.S. policy in the Middle East -- "raise very significant substantive concerns" for the White House, and that "we have to reassess our options going forward."
Post-colonial theory, as presented by anti-Israel professors like Noam Chomsky, Edward Said, and Rashid Khalidi, suggests that the world is divided between white, western imperialists and their non-European victims "of color" and that Israel is a white, European transplant onto the indigenous soil of another people.
Thus Israel - and ultimately thereby the Jews - must be opposed and undermined.
Yet, somehow, we are supposed to believe that this is actually in the best interest of the Jewish people.
It isn't.
Finally, John Kerry would honestly have us believe that if the U.S. Congress rejects the Iran deal, this is the fault of the Jews in Israel or will be considered as such?
This is profoundly disturbing and reminiscent of European thinking in the early-middle part of the twentieth-century.