John Kerry is
attempting to walk back his smear of Israel as an “apartheid” state. That the
current secretary of state is a clownish figure has been well known for decades.
But what should not be lost in the latest gaffe is that it is not a gaffe. In
what he foolishly thought was a safe place to let his hair down, Kerry merely
gave voice to what the Obama administration thinks. “Apartheid” trips easily off
his tongue because it is part of the Islamist narrative that the administration
has internalized.
Forget Kerry.
This was made explicit in Obama’s 2009 Cairo speech—for anyone who didn’t infer
it already from Obama’s friendships with notorious Israel bashers like Rashid
Khalidi and Bill Ayers (see P. David Hornik’s FPM report on Ayers joining his fellow tenured radicals
in a 2010 petition accusing Israel of — all together now — apartheid
policies). As I recounted in The Grand Jihad, Obama’s speech “combined
fictional accounts of Islamic history and doctrine, a woefully ignorant
explanation of Israel’s claim to its sovereign territory, and an execrable moral
equivalence drawn between Southern slave owners in early America and modern
Israelis besieged by Palestinian terror.”
On the latter
two points, in what I described as a “sweet-sounding sell-out,” the president
claimed:
The
recognition that the aspiration for a Jewish homeland is rooted in a tragic
history that cannot be denied. Around the world, the Jewish people were
persecuted for centuries, and anti-Semitism in Europe culminated in an
unprecedented Holocaust.
The Muslim
Brotherhood leaders invited to the speech over the Mubarak government’s
objection must have been giddy. My book explains:
“The basic
Arab argument against Israel,” Caroline Glick observes, is that the Jewish
nation was established for a single reason: “to soothe the guilty
consciences of Europeans who were embarrassed about the Holocaust. By
their telling, the Jews have no legal, historic or moral rights to the Land of
Israel.”
This is
patently false. As Melanie Phillips put it:
The Jews’
aspiration for their homeland does not derive from the Holocaust, nor their
overall tragic history. It derives from Judaism itself, which is composed
of the inseparable elements of the religion, the people and the land.
Their unique claim upon the land rests upon the fact that the Jews are the only
people for whom Israel was ever their nation, which it was for hundreds of
years—centuries before the Arabs and Muslims came on the scene.
Exactly. The legal,
historical, and moral claims of Jews predate Adolph Hitler by many
centuries. As Glick elaborates, what the League of Nations mandated in
1922 was not the creation but the reconstitution of the Jewish
commonwealth. Moreover, by emphasizing “anti-Semitism in Europe,” Obama
ignored the Nazis’ alliance with the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and the
Palestinians—“and the fact,” Phillips adds, “that Nazi-style Jew-hatred
continues to pour out of the Arab and Muslim world to this day.”
It was all
well and good for the president to discourage “threatening Israel with
destruction” and the repetition of “vile stereotypes about Jews.” But this
was just buttering-up rhetoric, preparing the way for a wholesale adoption of
Palestinian mythology.
According to
Obama, it was “undeniable” that for sixty years the Palestinians had suffered in
pursuit of a homeland, endured the pain of dislocation, and been confined “in
refugee camps in the West Bank, Gaza, and neighboring lands,” waiting, ever
waiting for “a life of peace and security that they have never been able
to lead.”
This is
preposterous. Let’s put aside that the Palestinians have controlled Gaza
since 2005—any refugee camps there are courtesy of Hamas. The Arabs, Phillips
pointed out, could easily have created a Palestinian state during the twenty
years (between 1948 and 1967) that Jordan and Egypt held the West Bank and Gaza,
respectively. They opted not to do so. Before that, the Palestinians had been
offered a homeland in 1936 and 1947, and Israel renewed the offer in 1967 and
2000. They keep turning down these entreaties because their goal is to
destroy Israel, not coexist in “peace and security.”
How fitting
it would have been, in Cairo, for an American president to look [the al-Azhar
University officials in the audience] in the eye and observe that Egypt, too,
has a border with Gaza, which they police energetically—at times, brutally—to
seal off the Palestinians.
But no,
instead we got Islamism 101: The Israeli settlements in the Palestinian
territories are illegitimate, the president declared. They “undermine efforts to
achieve peace” and must stop. Unstated, naturally, were the nettlesome facts
that: (a) a million Arabs live in Israel (live, in fact, with more freedom and
dignity than Arabs live anywhere else in the Middle East), and (b) Palestinians
demand a “right of return” to Israel (one that would destroy its character as a
Jewish state) as part of any final settlement. Hectoring Israel over the
settlements is the world according to sharia: What’s Islam’s is Islam’s,
and what’s yours is Islam’s.
Worse than
that, though, Obama treated listeners to this bit of wisdom: “Resistance
through violence and killing is wrong and does not succeed” (emphasis added).
Resistance is a weasel word par excellence—sort of Saul Alinsky for
Islamists. It is how the Islamist can tell you, straight-faced, that he is
vigorously opposed to “terrorism.” In his mind, “terrorism” is American national
defense and the existence of the Zionist entity. Blowing up Israelis and
American troops, by contrast, is not terrorism—it’s resistance. By using
their weasel word, the president accepted a noxious premise: The Palestinians
are an oppressed people, not a people trying to annihilate their unwanted
neighbors. Their violence and killing is not a moral wrong but a tactical
problem—“it will not succeed.”
And why
not? Well, because in Obama’s twisted history, the Palestinians are just
like “black people in America” fighting for their civil rights . . . which, of
course, implicitly casts Israelis in the role of slave owners inflicting “the
lash of the whip.” Those civil rights, Obama maintained, were won solely
“by peaceful and determined resistance.”
In Cairo, the
president drew a despicable analogy between (a) the plight of American blacks
from the time of slavery through the civil rights movement led by Martin Luther
King Jr. and (b) the Palestinian campaign of terror that has failed to achieve
statehood because its unrelenting goal—reaffirmed recently as a few days ago when Hamas
and Fatah united—is the annihilation of the Jewish state, not peaceful
coexistence with it.
I do not
understand how anyone who heard Obama’s Cairo speech could be remotely surprised
by Kerry’s “apartheid” remarks.
Thanks NG
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