It’s good to see that despite the ongoing deconstruction of his “legacy” by his predecessor, Barack Obama has retained his sense of humor. On Saturday, the man who originated the use Twitter as a presidential bully pulpit (a reality that Democrats have been quick to forget) issued a tweet regarding the deadly shootings at a Pittsburgh synagogue that morning.
“We grieve for the Americans murdered in Pittsburgh,” the former president wrote, adding, “All of us have to fight the rise of anti-Semitism and hateful rhetoric against those who look, love, or pray differently. And we have to stop making it so easy for those who want to harm the innocent to get their hands on a gun.”
We grieve for the Americans murdered in Pittsburgh. All of us have to fight the rise of anti-Semitism and hateful rhetoric against those who look, love, or pray differently. And we have to stop making it so easy for those who want to harm the innocent to get their hands on a gun.
— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) October 27, 2018
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
His call for gun control mere hours after the shootings had occurred was crassly political, though predictable. His fellow Democrats who are still active members of Congress beat him to it in many cases.
But where does this guy — arguably the president most hostile to Jews in modern times — get off pretending to oppose anti-Semitism? Actually, if you look at his words closely, he dilutes his condemnation by expanding it to include “hateful rhetoric against those who look, love, or pray differently,” meaning of course gays and Muslims.”
Obama’s track record speaks for itself. One of his proudest accomplishments as president was to hammer out a toothless agreement with Iran, a sworn enemy of Israel and of Jews everywhere, whereby the theocracy would reduce its stockpile of uranium and discontinue enriching uranium for 13 years. In exchange, his administration agreed to turn over $100 billion in frozen Iranian assets — which the state sponsor of terrorism immediately turned around and spent on guess what.
As LU contributor Jeff Dunetz noted in 2014, the Obama administration made a distinction between ISIS, which attacks people of all religions including their own, and Hamas, whose sole target is Jews.
Obama’s personal actions were even more pointedly anti-Semitic. In January, a 2005 photograph of then-Illinois Sen. Barack Obama and notorious Jew-hater Louis Farrakhan surfaced along with the story of efforts to suppress it for fear it would damage Obama’s political future.
But as I wrote back then, the release of the photo in 2008 probably wouldn’t have altered the outcome of the 2008 election because voters had other, more compelling evidence of Obama’s anti-Semitism, and chose to ignore it. I am referring of course to his pastor and mentor, Jeremiah Wright, who hated Jews and just about everyone else who wasn’t black. Nor was his anti-Semitism limited to his weekly sermons, which Obama attended for twenty years. After Obama was elected president, Wright said of Obama in a 2009 interview, “Them Jews ain’t going to let [Obama] talk to me. … He’s got to do what politicians do. And the Jewish vote, the AIPAC vote that’s controlling him.”
