Obama the Savior
By Caroline B. Glick
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com
| Speaking in February of the man she
knows better than anyone else does, Michelle Obama said that her
husband, Illinois Senator and candidate for the Democratic
Presidential nomination Barack Obama, is the only candidate for
president who understands that before America can solve its problems,
Americans have to fix their "broken souls."
She also said that her husband's unique understanding of the state of
souls of the American people makes him uniquely qualified to be
President. Obama can do what his opponent in the Democratic race
Senator Hillary Clinton, and Senator John McCain, the presumptive
Republican presidential nominee, cannot do. He can heal his
countrymen's broken souls. He will redeem them.
But then, saving souls is hard work, and Mrs. Obama won't place the
whole burden on her husband. He'll make the Americans work for him. As
she put it, "Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to
demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions.
That you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort
zone. That you push yourselves to be better. And that you engage.
Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual,
uninvolved, uninformed."
At base, Mrs. Obama's statement is nothing less than a renunciation of
democracy and an embrace of fascism. The basic idea of liberty is that
people have a natural right to live their lives as usual and to be
uninvolved and uninformed. And they certainly have a right to expect
that their government will butt out of their souls.
IN CONTRAST, fascist societies, as Jonah Goldberg notes in the latest
issue of National Review, are all about the notions of "unity" and
"change" and melding our broken souls into a fixed, united will for
change that Obama has made the core theme of his campaign. Goldberg
compared "unity" with "patriotism," and explained that while the
latter connotes the willingness to defend the moral values of a
society, unity is bereft of any moral content. "The only value of
unity is strength, strength in numbers - and... that is a fascist
value. That's the symbolism of the fasces, the bundle of sticks that
in combination are invincible."
Many commentators have argued that Jews in both Israel and the US have
a specific reason to fear an Obama presidency. Much attention has been
paid to Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the anti-Semitic, black supremacist
preacher who has served as Obama's spiritual guide for the past 20
years. Then too, there are Obama's foreign policy advisors who range
from the viscerally hostile towards Israel (Zbigniew Brzezinski,
Robert Malley, Samantha Power, Merrill Tony McPeak) to the
messianically hostile towards Israel (Dan Kurtzer). Obama's close
associations with Palestinian and pan-Arab champions and jihad
apologists like the late Edward Said and Prof. Ra****d Khalidi, and his
stated intention to have open negotiations with Iran about the
mullocracy's nuclear weapons program, his monetary ties to anti-Israel
donors like George Soros and to anti-Israel organizations like
Moveon.org are similarly pointed to as reasons for concern.
But the fact is that for all his associations with Israel-bashers,
Obama's stated positions on the Palestinian and Arab conflict with
Israel are all but indistinguishable from those of his opponent
Senator Hillary Clinton. Both democratic candidates assert that the
Palestinian conflict with Israel is the root of the pathologies of the
Arab world. Like President George W. Bush, both embrace the Fatah
terror group as a legitimate organization and acceptable repository of
Palestinian sovereignty. Both have hinted that they may be willing to
open negotiations with Hamas. Both argue that the establishment of a
Palestinian state will be a key foreign policy objective of their
administrations.
While Sen. Clinton rejects Obama's desire to openly appease the Iran's
mullahs, her announced strategy for contending with the specter of a
nuclear-armed Iran would not necessarily be more effective than
Obama's plan to appease the ayatollahs. Last week, Clinton explained
that she believes that the US's position on Iran should be based on a
credible threat of "massive retaliation" in the event that the
mullocracy develops and uses nuclear weapons.
THERE ARE two reasons that a deterrence model will be as ineffective
in curbing Iranian aggression as Obama's appeasement model. First, as
last week's 25th anniversary of the Iranian-sponsored bombing of the
US embassy in Beirut recalled, Iran has been attacking the US and its
allies both directly and through proxies since 1979. To date, not only
has the US failed to deter such attacks, it has never made Iran pay a
price for them. With this abysmal track record against a non-nuclear
Iran, it is hard to see how the US can threaten a nuclear-armed Iran
with sufficient credibility to make a deterrence-based strategy
successful.
The second reason that basing US policy towards Iran on a deterrence
model will likely fail is because Iran's leader****p has made clear
that is not necessarily concerned about the survivability of Iran.
From Ayatollah Khomeini to Ayatollah Khamenei to Ali Rafsanjani to
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran's leader****p has made clear that they are
not Iranian patriots but global Islamic revolutionaries. Given their
millenarian, apocalyptic view of their country's purpose in world
affairs, there is good reason to believe that a strategy based on some
form of mutually assured destruction would have only marginal impact
on Iran's decision-makers. So from a foreign policy perspective, there
is little to distinguish Sen. Clinton from Sen. Obama. Indeed, there
is little that distinguishes the two candidates from a domestic policy
perspective. But that gets us back to the messianic business.
OPPONENTS OF Clinton claim that she is a soulless woman who will do
whatever is necessary to have power, because she likes power and wants
it. But if this is true it is hard to see why a power-hungry president
is worse than a president who believes that he is the people's
redeemer. It is hard to see why a leader who wants power because she
likes power is less reasonable than a president who thinks he has a
right to demand that the American people follow his lead and fix their
souls in the name of unity. In the former case, opposition to the
leader is a policy dispute. In the latter case, it is apostasy.
When someone wants power for power's sake, that person tends to be
fairly pragmatic. In his first term of office, when former president
Bill Clinton - another consummate pragmatist who liked having power -
understood his wife's healthcare plan was about to be defeated
overwhelmingly by Congress, he shelved the plan and cut his losses.
A messianic wouldn't do that. When a messianic leader is faced with
failure, his tendency is to castigate the people, or his political
opposition, or the media as evil and to continue on unmoved and bring
his country down with him. President Woodrow Wilson's unpopular and
unsuccessful championing of US member****p in the League of Nations and
former president Jimmy Carter's wooing of American enemies in the name
of peace are examples of what happens when messianic redeemer types
are confronted with reality.
So with this distinction between the two senators in mind, the
question is, how will a President Hillary Clinton or a President
Barack Obama respond after being shown that appeasement of the
Palestinians has once again failed and that appeasement or deterrence
of the Iranian regime has also failed once again? Given their distinct
emotional makeup, it can be assumed that Obama will argue that reality
is wrong and continue on - Carter-like - into the abyss and drag his
country and Israel down with him. Acting in a Clinton-like way,
Clinton on the other hand, would be more likely to pick a fight with
Serbia - or call for a federal ban on chewing tobacco in a bid to
change the subject.
What is most interesting about the danger that Obama constitutes for
Israel is how un-unique it is. It is no different than the danger the
prospect his presidency constitutes for America. The reason that
pseudo-realist Israel bashers and messianic peace mongering Israel
bashers sup****t Obama is because they naturally gravitate towards a
man on a mission to save the free world from itself.
An empowered, free citizenry will question the realism behind their
decision to pretend that the global jihad is the figment of the Jewish
lobby's imagination. A cowed, on its way to being redeemed by Obama's
cult of personality citizenry will be in no position to argue with
them.
The same is as true of domestic issues as it is of foreign policy.
When the Obama/Clinton tax hikes and economic protectionism exacerbate
the current US recession, under an Obama presidency, rather than
debating the merits of the administration's failed economic policies,
the American people will be told that they need to have more
"discussions" about race to remind them how mean they are and how much
they are in need of President Obama's spiritual healing. If they are
again attacked by jihadists, they will be lectured by Rev. Wright's
longtime follower, their president, about how black enslavement, his
white grandmother, Israel, anti-abortion senators and their own
"cynicism" played a role in convincing the jihadists to kill
innocents.
US Jews have always had a weakness for messianic leaders and
movements. Sometimes, as in the case of the civil rights movement,
that tendency towards utopianism has had good results. More often it
has not. In the current presidential race, American Jews, like all
their fellow Americans, would be wise to consider if they are truly
ready to accept Obama as their savior.
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