Is Obama a Neville Chamberlain? Sorry – He’s Far Worse

Thomas F. Roeser

When I read Barack Obama’s speech in Cairo I thought initially of two words: Neville Chamberlain.

But then I decided I was wrong and doing an injustice to Chamberlain. Neville Chamberlain was an accommodationist weakling, not a conservative but a technocrat, who decided at Munich in 1938 that his country did not have the stuff to contest Hitler – so he conceded the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia to Germany. An evil action. But the latest research indicates he did this to stall until British armaments increased. At least he meant well. But when things blew up, his best friend in the House recited Oliver Cromwell’s declaration to the Rump parliament:

“You have sat too long for any good you have been doing! Depart, I say and let us have done with you! In the name of God, go!”

Chamberlain left as a man and the King chose Winston Churchill. Nevertheless, it is seen now that Chamberlain was a British patriot who never criticized his country in order to gain cheap applause at Munich or Bergtesgarden and never, ever presented to the Nazis or the pacifists of England an equivalence between the two systems. And once he was betrayed, he remained as prime minister long enough to declare war on Germany… and served valiantly in Churchill’s war cabinet until his death and at whose funeral Churchill delivered the eulogy.

No, that comparison won’t work.

What WILL work is this: The Obama at Cairo is not an American patriot. He is the same Obama as when he first went on my radio show immediately after his election to the Illinois state senate. Then he listened to the talk radio audience and presented himself as a philosopher king who saw equivalence in every hot issue but loyalty to neither side. I remember that night the call-in audience was very concerned with the 2nd Amendment – some wanted conceal carry, some wanted confiscation of guns. “You have a point,” he said to one group and “you, too, have a point” to the opposite group. He presented an opaque equivalence. He disavowed the past controversy over guns, saying he had not been in the legislature before so he seemed to reject both sides. Yet when he got into office, he was a gun confiscator.

As campaigner and president, he disaffiliates himself from the past in almost every case. He is disinterested in history and the past and presents a kind of philosophical even-handedness – moral equivalence – between our system and the one which has killed 3,000 on our own shores. In essence, because of his Third World background and his quietly-hidden disaffection with American history, he – OBAMA – is our first non-American president, a thorough-going advocate of equivalence…the policy of the open hand where there are no absolutes, no final judgments…taking no firm stand but going as far as he can to win favor from America’s critics - by which strategy he abandons America’s past in favor of himself, to celebrate his true narcissism which outranks the wellbeing of the country.

It is obvious that he is at one with those in Cairo as a critic of America. Because of his alienated background (he was abandoned by not one, but two, fathers and he was nurtured –a if you can call it that – by a mother angered at the West and an atheist), the stonewalling about eligibility from his White House (where no valid birth certificate can be produced) concerning his actually being born in Kenya when his mother was refused airline passage back to Hawaii because her advanced pregnancy would be dangerous, makes sense. He, therefore, seems intellectually as well as constitutionally unable to register an affiliation here. He is a Third World resident, too subtly sly to let on his true beliefs. As Obama himself has stated “I am a citizen of the world.”

This means psychologically he is a person apart from the country, finally conceding to the Egyptians (although his campaign would not to us) that he is keenly aware of the thrust of Muslim thought. His entire attractiveness to the liberals and to the unaffiliated as a man of stature is that he has disavowed patriotic identification with this country, has declared that all nations are equivalent to us…rejecting American exceptionalism…because he does not feel it nor appreciate it. He has said that this is not a Christian country but has incorporated the religion of the founders into a polyglot…and, in Cairo, flagrantly inflated the number of Muslims in this country to a supposed 7 million. No statistic can be found to justify that oleaginous allegation.

Ergo: he is a scary composite, a living fraud, really because as he well knows…and as his closest associates understand…he is the first president to be elected who, knowingly unqualified by birth, is not a patriot. His Cairo speech then was a buttering up of our enemies…in a way that no other chief executive has done. Consider other liberal presidents. Granted, Kennedy was a weakling, who flubbed up on Cuba from which disaster came the erection of the Berlin Wall, the Cuban Missile crisis…which Bobby resolved by pulling our missiles out of Turkey surreptitiously, thus pulling his brother’s fat out of the fire at the same time…gaining for JFK yet another undeserved plaudit, one of a host of undeserved plaudits.

Nevertheless, moral rogue and failure as a president that he was, Kennedy was a patriot. With his speech at Berlin he never insulted or questioned his own country, he never equivocated or implied there is an equivalence between the USSR and the U.S. The fact that he never declared nor implied it is in Kennedy’s favor. It is amazing that the best thing I can say about Kennedy is that – self-seeking, inept as he was – he was a patriot. And that is what I can’t say about Obama. He is self-seeking, perhaps not inept at all – quite probably a brilliant Machievellian – but he is definitely not a patriot.

Not that Obama hates this country, but as a Third Worlder, he is committed to the Third World while his interest here is purely political. No, he is not a patriot, definitely. And that bodes very, very ill for this country. He is the first non-patriot to be president. Frankly this octogenarian wonders whether this country can survive with a president who is not a patriot…with one who does not hate this country but one who refuses to think of it lovingly – just as a place he, with undeniable charm but which this country in its cultural decadence got the man it deserves, ended up leading.

With that in mind, let’s look at his speech.

He begins with an examination of tensions between the United States and Muslims throughout the world. Fair enough – but if you read him closely (as I have three times) you have no doubt as to which side he assigns blame for the tensions. The tensions have been fed by Western colonialism. WAIT! What countries have we subjugated and held captive by colonization? To the contrary, we committed ourselves militarily six times in the past in the past 20 years to defend Muslim populations in Somalia, the Balkans, Middle East and Afghanistan. Nary a line about that from Obama. Of course it wouldn’t have generated applause in Cairo…the only yardstick used by him and Axelrod.

Then he says there was mistreatment of Muslims during the Cold War. WAIT! The Cold War was what Kennedy called “a long twilight struggle” but it was waged on behalf of freedom by Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter (to some degree), Reagan and Bush. SEE WHAT I MEAN? He distances himself from loyalty to the past. He is in fact a new arrival from the Third World, taking a so-called Philosopher-King view in his talk at Cairo, separating himself from the prior goals of his country. That’s what I mean about his having a non-American in view of history.

Another reason for the alienation: “The sweeping change brought by modernity and globalization which led many Muslims to view the West as hostile to the traditions of Islam” – which he implies are our responsibility. Once again, he is apologizing for all of us and for his predecessors out of a sense of narcissistic detachment…to gain applause from our enemies.

Cut to Israel and the Palestinians. Here notice an outrageous equivalence: Israel is home to an historically persecuted people. Thus to threaten Israel with destruction he says is “deeply wrong.” At the same time…and here comes the equivalence…“it is also undeniable that the Palestinian people - Muslims and Christians - have suffered in pursuit of a homeland.” HOLD IT RIGHT THERE. Victims of the Holocaust are equated equally with the uprooted Palestinians – who were uprooted after they lost a war they started? Insupportable. How were the Palestinians uprooted? In 1948 there came the Arab-Israeli war when Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon teamed up and captured Gaza, the West Bank, Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights. In 1967 there came the Six Day War where Israel retook Gaza, the West Bank, Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights. That’s when the uprooted Palestinians occurred – after the Arabs lost the war.

Obama courts his audience with indications of equivalence that Israel denies Palestinians the right to exist – even as Palestinians threaten to drive Israel into the sea. No recognition of the fact that in 2000 Ehud Barak offered almost all the territories Palestinians sought. Yasser Arafat turned thumbs down and began the second Intifada. In 2005 Israel did what no other nation ever did before – not the Jordanians, not to the British: they provided the Palestinians with a chance for self-rule, in return for which it was shelled by thousands of rockets and mortars. Hamas appropriated Gaza as a launching pad.

Obama does some fancy footwork to appeal to his Muslim audience. Israel’s “right to exist cannot be denied” but “neither can Palestine’s” which got a big hand from the audience. Terrific. Once again, he postures, seemingly standing above the fray as the Philosopher King, which generated huge applause. It’s as if Obama is saying Israel denies Palestine’s right to exist…after it pulled out of Sinai, Lebanon, Gaza. What did the Palestinians do? Wage a war of attrition. Wire up their children to blow up a food market.

The fact is, as Obama knows full well, the Palestinians have been inconsolable in this fight. Does Obama think that if Israel gives up its settlements peace will reign? Not in the slightest. That is not, and has never been, the Palestinian way.

I could go on and on but essentially Obama’s intent is as clear as the faint line of a mustache that appears now on his face: by going to Egypt and by meeting with the Saudi Arabs he is scuttling the democratic agenda and is doing what Franklin Roosevelt did - realigning the U. S. with the Arab dictators, the people who are oppressing the Arab street and, as a means of diversion, have encouraged American hatred to deflect the street’s hatred.

That may result in a litany of woe for the United States.

If we had a truly investigative and free mainstream media in the United States, we would see the presidential eligibility issue debated. If the White House produces a valid birth certificate showing that Obama is a “natural born citizen” as the Constitution prescribes, fine. That it has not up to now, shows a deadly collaboration between the liberal toadies of the media and the Axelrod gang that has ingratiated themselves into power. Did you see NBC’s Brian Williams gushing like a schoolgirl with a rock star for the privilege of interviewing Obama?

There’s an old saying: Show me the money! I say show us the valid certificate of birth, not a copy, and not a Certification of Live Birth which you have used on the Internet to confuse the citizens of America.

Justice demands that the American public tell Obama what Cromwell did the Rump Parliament…which I pray I will live long enough to see:

“You have sat too long for any good you have been doing! Depart and let us have done with you! In the name of God, go!”

FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Thomas F. Roeser, chairman of the editorial board of Chicago's first internet newspaper, The Chicago Daily Observer, www.cdobs.com, is radio talk show host, writer, lecturer, teacher and former vice president of The Quaker Oats Company of Chicago. A former John F. Kennedy Fellow, Harvard and Woodrow Wilson International Fellow, Princeton, N. J., Roeser is the author of the book Father Mac: The Life and Times of Ignatius D. McDermott, Co-Founder of Chicago's Famed Haymarket Center. In addition he is Chicago correspondent of The Wanderer, the oldest weekly national Catholic newspaper and writes on his own blog www.tomroeser.com.