The college student in chief makes non-negotiable demands on the university president … uh, on Israel

Avi Davis writing at American Thinker says that the Obama administration’s bizarre confrontation with Israel over a housing building permit in a Jewish neighborhood in Jerusalem has united as never before normally divided factions of Jews in Israel and the U.S.—and, moreover, united them in opposition to a Democratic U.S. president, while enhancing the political capital of liberal demon Benjamin Netanyahu. All the opposite of what Obama intended.

Similar to my point in a previous entry, Davis explains Obama’s irrationally hostile conduct toward Israel as an expression of his leftist ideology, the “script” through which liberals view reality:

So what playbook is Barack Obama and his administration reading from in breathing life into a crisis that should never have been? It is, I believe, simply this: Obama sees the world in terms of a rather protean struggle between the weak and the strong, the poor and the rich. The weak in his eyes are almost always innocent purveyors of righteousness and while the powerful personify greed and oppression. The same world view permeates his domestic policies and can be read between the lines of his push for health care reform, his castigation of rich bankers, his penchant for apologizing for American actions abroad and his willingness to risk U.S security for the benefit of the human rights of enemy combatants.

The Palestinians have won his sympathy in spite of their proclivity for deception and their gift of the suicide bomber to the world. In his first year in office, the President has rarely leveled any criticism at Palestinian temporization and yet demonstrated increasing impatience for the fat cat Israelis in Jerusalem and even more for their supporters in Washington. After all, they represent the kind of world for which he has contempt….

[T]his administration has fanned into a life a blaze it will spend many months trying to extinguish and in the process revealed a political immaturity and flailing inexperience that should worry Barack Obama’s even most ardent admirers.

This is evidently correct. When a mere press release about the third stage of approval of a seven-stage long process for the building of homes in a Jewish neighborhood occurred during Vice President Biden’s visit to Israel, the event, utterly routine and insignificant in itself, activated in Obama’s mind his main template for viewing the world: rich white oppressors arrogantly stamping down poor brown folk, “white folks’ greed running a world in need.” His deepest buttons pressed, Obama took off from there, and has kept escalating the confrontation ever since.

I have many times remarked that Obama with his extreme skinniness looks like a college student, not a president. Here he is behaving like a college student, railing against the fictional oppressor. Indeed, his ultimatum to Israel over this total non-issue can be seen as his personal equivalent of an angry demonstration by college students against the school’s administration set off by some fake hate crime: “We demand an ethnic studies department … We demand increased admission of minority students … We demand sensitivity workshops … We demand an end of the racist atmosphere on this campus… “

- end of initial entry -

LA writes:

It continues to stun that Obama, who artfully maintained his mask of calm, thoughtful moderate during his pre-presidential career, instantly removed the mask when he became president and showed the remorseless radical within. Did he think Americans wouldn’t notice that he had fooled them? He didn’t care. Such is his alienation and hostility toward this country.

Boris S. writes:

That America has unambiguously taken Israel’s side against that of its Arab enemies is a myth. Why does the fact that America gives billions of dollars in aid to Israel’s enemies (some 2 billion in annual aid to Egypt alone), which is quite independent from the largest transfer of wealth in world history in the form of petrodollars, go unmentioned? Or that the Arab states hostile to Israel are armed with some of the most advanced American weaponry (those M1 Abrams tanks and F16s)? If Israel is ever done in militarily, it is certain that American weapons in the hands of the Arabs would play a prominent role. What about the pattern of intense American pressure on Israel to cede ever more territory, beginning with the threats by the likes of Kissinger, Carter, and Brzezinski which compelled Israel to withdraw from the entire Sinai in the 70’s, and continuing to this day with Obama’s opposition to “settlements” in Jerusalem? Or the America’s ongoing arming and training of PLO “security forces”? The truth is that America has long played both sides of the conflict in pursuit of its perceived interests. It is therefore not right to speak of what might happen if America “abandons” Israel: what people really mean by that is America’s total siding with the Arab Muslims. It would be more honest to speak of it as such.

LA replies:

Agreed. I’ve pointed out many times that the more Israel has made concessions to the Arabs, and the more the U.S. has pressured Israel to make concessions to the Arabs, the more the enemies of Israel accuse Israel of being a fascist oppressor state and accuse America of being its lackey. At the core of this madness is anti-Jewishness.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 18, 2010 07:30 AM | Send