When U.S. President Barack Obama announced his candidacy for president in 2007, he was just two years removed from having served as an undistinguished backbencher in the Illinois State Senate. Some people committed to the U.S.-Israel relationship took the time to explore Obama’s background in Illinois, and found a significant number of troubling things. One of the explorers was Ed Lasky in the American Thinker. Lasky’s article on Obama and Israel was widely (though quietly) circulated by the Hillary Clinton campaign in her ultimately unsuccessful effort against Obama to win the Democratic nomination in 2008. Clinton believed that policy toward Israel was a major differentiating factor between herself and Obama, and in the primaries, Clinton won more votes than Obama among Jewish Democrats.
Another writer who came to explore Obama’s history on Israel and the Palestinians was Stanley Kurtz, who arguedtwo years into Obama’s first term that Obama was indeed a man of the hard Left, particularly when it came to the Middle East struggle. It did not take a lot of digging to discover that Obama’s mentors on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict included the likes of Rashid Khalidi, Edward Said, radical activist Bill Ayers, his minister Reverend Jeremiah Wright and Electronic Intifada founder Ali Abunimah. In perhaps the most meaningful article on the subject, and one that was almost entirely ignored by the national media, Abunimah argued in “How Barack Obama Learned to Love Israel” that the once Palestinian-friendly Obama had tacked toward Israel so as to look like more of a mainstream candidate and help get himself elected as senator and then president (and to collect lots of campaign cash from pro-Israel liberal Jews for his election contests). To get some idea of how radical Obama’s long-time friend Abunimah is on the subject of Israel, he opposed the U.N. Security Council resolution passed on Friday for not being harsh enough in targeting Israel (no sanctions) and for condemning violence committed by those who are only exercising resistance against occupation.
In both of his races for president in 2008 and 2012, Obama won a large majority of the Jewish vote according to exit polls, though some Jewish voters seemed to have wised up, noticing during Obama’s first term that the president was a lot less than advertised in terms of support for the Jewish state. Among Jews, the gap between support for Obama and for his Republican opponent dropped from 56 to 39 percentage points.
On Friday, while vacationing in Hawaii, Obama observed his normal pattern of not being around to face the music when something controversial occurs, ordering his U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power to abstain on U.N. Security Council Resolution 2334, which targeted all Israeli activity, settlements and otherwise, beyond the 1949 armistice line, as a violation of international law. The measure also called for the nations of the world to take account of the dividing line, meaning of course that boycotts of Israeli products produced on the wrong side of the line, or by companies that produced products on both sides, were in order. Jews now living in the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem, where they have lived nearly continuously for the last 3,000 years, are apparently illegal settlers in the eyes of the United Nations and Barack Obama.