Most western Jews, for obvious historical reasons, tend to be left-leaning and concerned with issues of social justice and universal human rights.It is obviously no coincidence that one of the most kicked-around people in human history would support the rights of minority populations everywhere in the world, including their home state of Israel. It is for this reason that the country of the Jewish people has a far better human rights record than any of their hostile neighbors. Despite malicious claims otherwise throughout the Muslim world and among pussitudenous western-left Jews, Israel treats Palestinian-Arabs far better than do their brothers and sisters elsewhere in that part of the world.
The great irony is that the political movement that claims to stand for social justice and universal human rights, the progressive-left, actually stands for neither. If it did, surely it would have stood up for the Yazidis when their people were being slaughtered by ISIS or it would have supported the Christian Copts in Egypt who suffer the Qur'anically-based genocidal intention of the far larger Muslim population.
It did neither.
In the United States the culmination of the four-year election cycle brings out the very worst in ideologically-blinkered political drones who do little more than spit hatred, ridicule, and contempt at their counterparts on the other side of the aisle.
{I find it disheartening and vaguely nauseating.}
Among American Jews, however, what never ceases to amaze is the tenacity with which they cling by their teeth to a political party that holds them in such contempt that its leadership honestly believes that they have every right to tell Jewish people where we may, or may not, be allowed to live.
They will vote for a political party with members that flew the flag of the Palestinian-Arabs inside the hall of the Democratic National Convention, even as some burned the Israeli flag just outside in the street.
Furthermore, they did so while calling for Intifada which is nothing less than calling for the murder of Jews on Jewish land.
In the early years of the Obama administration it was clear to many of us that Obama's insistence that Jews be allowed to live over here, but not over there, in the Land of Israel rang the death knell of the two-state solution. I wrote about it as early as 2009 in a piece entitled, The End of the Israeli-Palestinian Peace Process.
The point then, as now, is that by demanding "total settlement freeze" Barack Obama forced Benjamin Netanyahu and dictator Abbas into entirely irreconcilable positions. Netanyahu, if he were to maintain his governing coalition and the respect of Jewish Israelis, could never agree to Obama's anti-Semitic demand that Jews not be allowed to raise families on the very land where Jewish people come from. For his part Mahmoud Abbas was forced into the position where he could demand nothing less because he cannot afford to be seen as more pro-Israel or pro-Jewish than the American president.
Even Yassir Arafat was willing to sit at the big table while Jews built housing for themselves on land purchased within disputed territory. It took the Obama administration to turn it into a deal killer right out of the gate.
And, yet, lo these many years later, Obama continues to make such demands because he is clearly incapable of learning from past mistakes and because he honestly believes that he has the right to kick the Jewish people in the head whenever he so pleases.
Writing in Ha'aretz, Barak Ravid tells us of Obama administration fury at Jews for daring to build 300 housing units - a whole 300 - on historically Jewish land. He writes:
A senior U.S. official said that the White House boiled with anger at the advancement of the plan and even more at the timing of the decision – just a week after the signing of the military aid agreement by which the U.S. will give Israel $38 billion for a decade, and the day of the death of former president Shimon Peres, whose funeral was attended by President Barack Obama.
The White House "boiled with anger," huh?
I find it amusing that Israel sent Obama into a rage of fury at the mere thought of Jews building housing for themselves and their children on Jewish land. And, yet, against all rationality, the commander-in-chief is entirely complacent about the rise of Political Islam, which not only calls for the slaughter of all Infidels who refuse to submit to al-Sharia, but continues to perform an excellent job on that project to this very day.
The indignant reaction of Obama, the Democratic Party, and the western-left to the fact of Jewish people daring to build housing is reminiscent of the medieval princely authority to push Jews around in a likewise manner. Then, as now, western authorities believed that the Jews must comply to their prejudicial demands in regards the placement of arbitrary limitations on Jewish living spaces.
Furthermore, this most recent 38 billion dollar deal with the Obama administration gives the US government additional leverage over the Israeli government.
The statement, signed by Mark Toner, deputy spokesman for the State Department, drew an unusual linkage between the signing of the defense aid agreement with Israel and criticism of settlement building.
And this is precisely why Israel should never have signed this deal to begin with.
Israel has the capacity to build all the weaponry it needs and doing so would reinforce the Israeli economy through strengthening its arms-manufacturing sector. What the deal really means is that the Obama administration can twist Jewish-Israeli arms behind Jewish-Israeli backs in order to force them to conform to the wishes of dictator-terrorist Mahmoud Abbas and his friends in Brussels.
The saddest thing about all of this, however, is the obvious failure of Jewish self-esteem in the West.
Israeli Jews may stand tall and proud, but progressive-left Jewish Americans bow their heads before the kind of progressive-left virtue posturing and self-righteous indignation that the Obama administration has turned into a form of art.
When even the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) becomes an arm of the pro-Islamist Obama administration it sends a very strong signal that American Jewry is slowly falling into a chronic state of spineless prostration.
Jonathan Greenblatt of the ADL has pen and will grovel.
What a shame.
Michael Lumish is a blogger at the Israel Thrives blog as well as a regular contributor/blogger at Times of Israel and Jews Down Under.
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