The Otherness of a Closet Collectivist
Amir Taheri
Gatestone Institute, Nov. 29, 2020All through his brief political career, Barack Obama, the 44th President of the United States, has mused about what he sees as his “otherness”. In his latest book, A Promised Land, he claims that people saw him as someone “from everywhere and nowhere, a combination of ill-fitting parts like a platypus or some imaginary beast.”However, even if that were true, Obama’s “otherness” could be found elsewhere. To start with, he was the first person to win the US presidency after a brief stint in public office as a junior senator. (His successor Donald Trump didn’t have even that). Obama was also the first person to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize without having done anything for peace or war.With A Promised Land, he reveals another aspect of his “otherness.” He becomes the first US president to write not one but three autobiographies. Even then, his new book, 768 pages long in the American edition, is presented as only the first volume, with a second yet to be written. Taken together, Obama’s three autobiographies break the record set by President Ulysses S Grant with his 1,100 pages long memoirs.A good chunk of the present book is a rehash of Obama’s two previous offerings Dreams from My Father and The Audacity of Hope that covered his childhood and youth. Here, too, he maintains an air of mystery about his formative years in Indonesia. He is equally parsimonious in describing the influences that shaped his worldview. He says he read anything and everything, from Marx and Marcuse to Foucault and Virginia Woolf, but does not say what he learned from them.Obsessed with his “otherness”, Obama relates how he had to decide whether to develop himself as a black figure or a white one, finally deciding on the former. Having prioritized his “blackness,” he then decided to act as a white man, thus “understanding” why some “whites” had “an emotional, almost visceral reaction to my presidency.”He also writes that his “very presence in the White House triggered a deep-seated panic.” Although he offers no evidence, the pirouette enables him to claim victimhood, something fashionable in recent US history. That in turn, helps him dismiss criticism of his presidency as racism.Yet, he writes: “My conviction that racism was not inevitable may explain my willingness to defend the American ideal.” Even then, it is hard to know where Obama stands on anything. … [To read the full article, click the following LINK– Ed.]
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Obama’s Simmering Resentment of Benjamin Netanyahu
Jim Geraghty
National Review, Nov. 20, 2020
The final chapter of Barack Obama’s third memoir, A Promised Land, begins with an extensive review of the former president’s often-testy relationship with his Israeli counterpart, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Claims that Obama was explicitly anti-Israel or anti-Semitic were always hyperbolic, but his assessment of his dealings with Netanyahu reveals the bristling disdain that fueled perceptions he was not a stalwart or reliable ally of the Jewish state.
Obama is a careful writer, and he would never risk something as incendiary as an argument that AIPAC controlled or exercised undue influence over U.S. politics, or that its members had “dual loyalty” toward both Israel and the United States. But in his description of the group and its sway, he doesn’t really keep a safe distance from those arguments, either:
Members of both parties worried about crossing the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), a powerful bipartisan lobbying organization dedicated to ensuring unwavering U.S. support for Israel. AIPAC’s clout could be brought to bear on virtually every congressional district in the country, and just about every politician in Washington — including me — counted AIPAC members among their key supporters and donors. In the past, the organization had accommodated a spectrum of views on Middle East peace, insisting mainly that those seeking its endorsement support a continuation of U.S. aid to Israel and oppose efforts to isolate or condemn Israel via the U.N. and other international bodies. But as Israeli politics had moved to the right, so had AIPAC’s policy positions. Its staff and leaders increasingly argued that there should be ‘no daylight’ between the U.S. and Israeli governments, even when Israel took actions that were contrary to U.S. policy. Those who criticized Israeli policy too loudly risked being tagged as ‘anti-Israel’ (and possibly anti-Semitic) and confronted with a well-funded opponent in the next election.
As he gets down to the specifics of his relationship with Netanyahu, his resentment continues to show:
The noise orchestrated by Netanyahu had the intended effect of gobbling up our time, putting us on the defensive, and reminding me that normal policy differences with an Israeli prime minister — even one who presided over a fragile coalition government — exacted a domestic political cost that simply didn’t exist when I dealt with the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Japan, Canada or any of our other closest allies.
Time, and the intervening drama of the Trump administration, have made memories of Obama’s worst traits fade somewhat. But in A Promised Land, Obama’s habit of insisting he’s the only adult in the room, the lone voice of reason trapped between two straw-man extremes, returns with a vengeance. He even paints members of his own party as hypocrites and cowards who say they want Middle East peace but are never willing to stand up to the Israeli government: … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
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Obama’s Revisionist ‘Promised Land’
Dov Lipman
JNS, Nov. 26, 2020
I have never criticized former U.S. President Barack Obama publicly—neither during my time in the Knesset nor anywhere else—despite my having disagreed with many of his policies. I am of the strong opinion that Israelis should not engage in or interfere with American politics, and I regularly offer a blanket thank you to all American presidents, including Obama, for their economic and military support for Israel.
However, his memoir, A Promised Land, is filled with historical inaccuracies that I feel the need to address. His telling of Israel’s story (at the beginning of Chapter 25) not only exhibits a flawed understanding of the region—which clearly impacted his policies as president—but misleads readers in a way that will forever shape their negative perspective of the Jewish state.
Obama relates, for example, how the British were “occupying Palestine” when they issued the Balfour Declaration calling for a Jewish state. But labeling Great Britain as an “occupier” clearly casts doubt on its legitimacy to determine anything about the future of the Holy Land, and that wasn’t the situation.
While it is true that England had no legal rights in Palestine when the Balfour Declaration was issued in 1917, that changed just five years later. The League of Nations, the precursor to the United Nations, gave the British legal rights over Palestine in its 1922 “Mandate for Palestine,” which specifically mentions “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.”
The League also said that “recognition has thereby been given to the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine and to the grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country.”
The former president’s noted omission of the internationally agreed-upon mandate for the British to establish a home for the Jews in Palestine misinforms the reader, who will conclude that the movement for a Jewish state in Palestine had no legitimacy or international consent.
“Over the next 20 years, Zionist leaders mobilized a surge of Jewish migration to Palestine,” Obama writes, creating the image that once the British illegally began the process of forming a Jewish state in Palestine, Jews suddenly started flocking there.
The truth is that Jews, who maintained a continual presence throughout the 2,000 years that most were exiled from the land, had already been moving to Palestine in large numbers way before then; considerably more than 100,000 immigrants arrived in the late 19th century and beginning of the 20th century. Then, in the 1920s, high numbers fleeing anti-Semitism in Europe could only find safe haven in Palestine due to the United States having instituted quotas in 1924 on the number of Jews who could enter America.
The number of immigrants rose even more in the 1930s when Adolf Hitler rose to power and began his conquest of Europe while the world remained silent. … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
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Obama’s New Book Brings Back Memories of Deception
Bennett Ruda
Jewish Press, Nov. 30, 2020
Dov Lipman, who served as a member of Israel’s 19th Knesset, writes about Obama’s revisionist ‘Promised Land’ — a scathing review of the errors and outright misleading claims in Obama’s new
book.
After recounting — and debunking — numerous falsehoods, Lipman concludes:
“I have no problem with criticism of Israel. We can debate the issues in intellectually honest discussions, and in the end, we may have to agree to disagree about Israel’s policies. But no one should accept a book that is filled with historical inaccuracies that invariably lead innocent and unknowing readers to reach false conclusions. Such a devastating book has real-life ramifications and consequences.
“It is terribly disappointing. I surely would have expected truth, accuracy and fairness from Barack Obama, America’s 44th president. But the falsehoods and inaccuracies in this memoir only feed the theory that Obama was, in fact, anti-Israel. Now, through A Promised Land, he seeks to convince others to join him.” [emphasis added]
Rather than review the list of falsehoods and inaccuracies, I just want to note why we should not be surprised by Obama’s attack on Israel in his book.
On the one hand, we should recall Obama’s attempt to recast the narrative of Israel’s history as just a response to the Holocaust. In May 2008, presidential candidate Barack Obama told The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg how the Holocaust is the justification for the Jewish State of Israel:
“I know that that there are those who would argue that in some ways America has become a safe refuge for the Jewish people, but if you’ve gone through the Holocaust, then that does not offer the same sense of confidence and security as the idea that the Jewish people can take care of themselves no matter what happens. That makes it a fundamentally just idea.”
Never mind the 3,000-year-old Jewish ties to the land. Do you remember Obama’s speech during his trip to Cairo in June, 2009:
“America’s strong bonds with Israel are well known. This bond is unbreakable. It is based upon cultural and historical ties, and the recognition that the aspiration for a Jewish homeland is rooted in a tragic history that cannot be denied.” [emphasis added]
Sure, the Holocaust cannot be denied (if only!), but the Jewish historical, cultural and indigenous ties — well, that is another matter.
This pales in comparison to Obama’ rewriting of Israel’s history in his new book. But I want to concentrate on something else — on why we should have known about Obama’s disregard for Israel before he became president.
In June 2008, while at a Florida synagogue to reassure Jewish voters of his commitment to Israel, Obama was asked about his association with Rashid Khalidi. Obama responded: … [To read the full article, click the following LINK– Ed.]
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For Further Reference:
Obama’s Prophet Motive Led to the ‘Promised Land’ and Trump: Gerard Baker, WSJ, Nov. 23, 2020 — Central to the mainstream media’s morality-tale version of recent American political history is the symbolic juxtaposition of the Obama and Trump presidencies. It’s a classic story of the core struggle in human history: the tension in man’s soul between good and evil, between the idealism of our better nature and our baser desires and fears.
Obama’s Grotesque Self-Revisionism: John Loftus, National Review,Nov. 19, 2020 — In an episode of CBS’s 60 Minutes last Sunday, former president Barack Obama not-so-subtly compared Trump’s tenure in the White House to something out of a banana republic or a one-party totalitarian state.
A Promised Land’ Review: Obama Remembers: Philip Terzian, WSJ, Nov. 16, 2020 — The better presidential memoirs tend to have been written inadvertently—the Adams-Jefferson correspondence, Polk’s diary—or are not about the presidency at all: Grant on the Civil War, Eisenhower’s “Crusade in Europe.”
Obama’s Promised Land: Jerold Auerbach, Algemeiner, Nov. 30, 2020 — A Promised Land, Barack Obama’s newly-published 768-page memoir that tops The New York Times Best Seller List, borrows its title from the Biblical recounting of God’s promise to Abraham and his descendants. Millennia later that promised land was understood by Zionists to be the Land of Israel, where their ancient homeland would be restored.
The Legal Limit: The Obama Administration’s Attempts to Expand Federal Power: U.S. Senator Ted Cruz, Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Human Rights, 2020 — Of all the troubling aspects of the Obama presidency, none is more dangerous than the President’s persistent pattern of lawlessness, his willingness to disregard the written law and instead enforce his own policies via executive fiat.
Bowing Down to Obama: Armond White, National Review, Nov. 27, 2020 — ow can we miss you when you won’t go away?” political podcaster Yvette Carnell joked two years ago when Barack Obama began his comeback tour by making sideline pronouncements about the state of the nation after his brief retirement. Now the comeback is official, with two new Kool-Aid-drinker Obama hagiographies to prove it.
