Israeli Journalist: If Obama treated Israel like Reagan did, he’d be impeached
By Julio Severo
I came across an intriguing article, by Chemi Shale, in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. Shale makes some interesting points about Reagan, who is a conservative icon and is my conservative hero.
Reagan is considered a friend of Israel, but he never visited Israel. I ask a question: what hinders a friend of Israel from visiting Israel?
I am a friend of Israel. But my reason for not visiting Israel is economic. Given a chance, I would visit Israel.
Certainly, if I were a conservative president of the United States, I would pay a yearly visit to the Promised Land given by God to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and their Jewish descendants.
Above all, I would have the U.S. government to recognize officially Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. Incredibly, even though some U.S. presidents, including Reagan, said that they were friends of Israel, no one of them recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.
Chemi Shale highlights other major problematic issues a friend of Israel would never get involved with, but which Reagan got involved with. He said, “Former President Ronald Reagan’s confrontations with Israel were harsh and personal, yet Republican conservatives revere him and the Jews remember him as a great friend.”
In his first election in 1980, Reagan earned 39% of the Jewish vote. In his 1984 reelection, he managed to garner just 31%. In comparison, socialist Barack Obama earned an astonishing 78% of the Jewish vote in 2008, even though Obama is more pro-Islam and anti-Israel than Reagan.
Shale forgot mentioning the cruel case of the Jewish spy Jonathan Pollard, who has spent 29 years of an unprecedented life sentence in a U.S. federal prison for passing classified information to Israel, an ally of the United States. The typical sentence for this offense is 2 to 4 years. No one else in the history of the United States has ever received a life sentence for this offense. He was condemned by the Reagan administration.
Pollard was not spying for Israeli economic advantage against the U.S. He was spying just to help to make Israel safe against its neighboring Islamic nations, because the U.S. did not (and does not) reveal to its “friend” Israel the military secrets it knew about its other friends: the Muslim neighbors of Israel that hate Jews.
While NSA goes unpunished for spying the whole world for suspicious political and financial interests, a Jewish man was incredibly punished by the Reagan administration.
Even with his best political intentions, Reagan was never successful in his efforts to defeat the disgraceful abortion law, enacted in 1973 in the largest Protestant nation in the world. Since then, abortion, in any stage, has become a “sacred” right in America.
There are powerful dark forces in the U.S. government, and these forces use the U.S. government to keep a world hegemony, including in the Middle East. No one can “interfere” in their interests. These forces will not tolerate anyone — Israel, Russia or other nation — to disrupt their global influence. Possibly, this is the reason Reagan was so harsh, as pointed by Shale, to Israel. In fact, if we saw today Obama doing to Israel what Reagan did, Shale thinks we would call him an “enemy of Israel.”
Reagan’s allegedly anti-Israel policies and behavior should be blamed laid on oligarchic neocons, who use the U.S. and its presidents to keep their hegemony in the world.
I wonder: what would neocons have done to Reagan if his administration had officially recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel? What would they have done to him if he had put Israel above their hegemonic interests? What would they have done if he stopped burning incense to them?
If Reagan was not strong enough to defy these exceedingly bad boys, who will do it?
Perhaps Israel should stop recognizing Washington as the capital of the United States while the U.S. does not recognize Jerusalem. Yet, who is able to stand the brutish force of the American neocon empire?
Let’s be honest: Reagan did not act as a real conservative when he gave in to anti-Israel pro-Saudi Arabia neocons.
The real conservative should stand against these bad boys, even if defying them means martyrdom.
Imagine if Israel would launch a successful preemptive strike against a country that is building a nuclear bomb that threatens its very existence, and the American president would describe it as “a tragedy”.
And then, not only would the U.S. administration fail to “stand by its ally,” but it would actually lend its hand to a UN Security Council decision that condemns Israel, calls on it to place its nuclear facilities under international supervision and demands that it pay reparations (!) for the damage it had wrought.
And then, to add insult to injury, the U.S. president would impose an embargo on further sales of F-16 aircraft because Israel had “violated its commitment to use the planes only in self-defense.”
Can you imagine the uproar? Can you contemplate the brouhaha? I mean, if [Republicans believe] that President Obama is throwing Israel under the bus — what would they say about a president who actually turns his back on Israel in its greatest time of need? That he hurled Israel over the cliff with a live grenade in its pocket and into a burning volcano?
And what if that very same president, only a few months later, would decide to sell truly game-changing sophisticated weaponry to Saudi Arabia, an Arab country that is a sworn enemy of Israel? And not only would this president dismiss Israeli objections that these weapons endanger its security, but he would actually warn, in a manner that sent shivers down the spines of American Jews, that “it is not the business of other nations to make American foreign policy.”
I mean, what words would be left to describe such behavior, after the entire thesaurus’ arsenal of synonyms for “insult” “perfidy” and “knife in the back” have been exhausted to describe the official White House photo of President Obama talking to Prime Minister Netanyahu with his shoes on the table?
And what if this same president — you know who I’m talking about by now, but let’s keep up the charade — what if this same president, time after time after time, not only failed to exercise the U.S. veto in the UN Security Council to block anti-Israeli resolutions, but actually joined Muslim and Communist and other heathen countries in supporting Security Council decisions that condemned Israel for assassinating well-known terrorists; for annexing territories that Michele Bachman has clearly stated belong only to Israel; for killing violent jihadist students at Bir Zeit University; for waging war against the enemies of Western civilization in Lebanon; and even for “Israel’s policies and practices denying the human rights of Palestinians.” Denying the human rights of Palestinians? Who wrote that?
Especially when that president called for a settlement freeze that “more than any other action, could create the confidence needed for wider participation in these talks”; when he threatened a reluctant Israeli prime minister in an official letter that “the relationship between our two countries is at stake”; when the same Israeli prime minister — that this president couldn’t stand, by the way — is forced to ask why the US is treating Israel as if it was a “banana republic”; when this Administration’s secretary of defense doesn’t veil his criticism of Israel before a pro-Israeli crowd at the Saban Forum, but actually tells Congress in open session that the Israeli leader “is not a moderate”; or when the White House spokesman — Marlin Fitzwater, for God’s sake — says that the Israeli “occupation” actually “damages the self-respect and world opinion of the Israeli people.”
And finally imagine if this president not only never once visited Israel, despite being eight years in office, but he even balked at visiting a concentration camp, as Obama did after his speech in Cairo. You want to know why? Because — take a deep breath — because the Germans “feel that they have a guilt feeling that’s been imposed upon them.” Poor things.
But wait, I’m not finished yet. So where does this president insist on going, despite overwhelming Jewish objections and an emotional last-minute appeal by Elie Wiesel in the name of Holocaust survivors? To lay a wreath at a ceremony commemorating the memory of the soldiers of the Waffen SS, a Nazi unit designated as a criminal organization at the Nuremberg trials, whose soldiers committed countless war crimes, including the razing of the Warsaw Ghetto, and murdered hundreds of thousands of Jews. And what does this president, this American idol of Republican conservatives, this righteous gentile of right-wing Jews, what does he have to say about these Nazi war criminals? That “they were victims just as surely as the victims in the concentration camps."
NOW, SERIOUSLY, can you even begin to imagine what mayhem would break out if Obama would say such an insensitive, obtuse and borderline Holocaust-denying sentence? Can you picture the earthquake of rage and the tsunami of venom that would spontaneously and simultaneously erupt?
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