Israelis Transfixed and Confused by Obama
TEL AVIV—As if staring at each other across the front page of the newspaper, the 10-year-old boy bleeding from a Gaza rocket attack looked up into the controversial photo of the Illinois senator wrapped in a white turban.
“A Hillary Clinton Production,’’ proclaimed the headline in the tabloid Yediot Ahronot, Israel’s top-selling daily paper. “Obama, the Muslim.’’
The next day, however, Obama was back on the front page of Yediot, this time declaring, “I’m a friend of Israel,’’ in an exclusive interview.
The Democratic primary has captured the attention of the locally focused Israeli media, with Clinton-Obama coverage rivaling the daily violence of the Middle East conflict and a handful of political corruption scandals for airtime. For Israelis, the contest pits Clinton, almost a favorite-daughter candidate, against Obama, the political star whose Middle East positions are less well known and, therefore, more worrisome.
In a country that relies on its alliance with the U.S. as an existential asset, the coming of a new presidential administration will to a large extent determine local agendas—that is, containment of Iran and the tenor of peace talks with the Jewish state’s Arab neighbors. While the last two American commanders in chief are remembered for having cozy ties with Israeli prime ministers, Israelis also remember the friction with the administration of George Bush Sr. in the early 1990’s.
“I would say that their interest at this point is more personal rather than issue-oriented,’’ said Jacob Eilon, the nightly news co-anchor for Israel Channel 10, who was sent to the U.S. to cover the Super Tuesday voting. “It has always been about who is better for Israel. Hillary Clinton is perceived as friendly—Obama is still a mystery.’’
Remembering Clinton’s visits to Israel during her husband’s presidency, and Bill Clinton’s words of consolation after the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, the aura of the Clinton family still strikes deep emotional chords with Israelis.
In the other corner, there’s the Illinois wunderkind. In contrast to the popular enthusiasm he’s aroused in America, Obama has yet to win over Israelis, many of whom complain they are unfamiliar with his views on the Middle East save for a comment that he’ll talk with hostile leaders like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
“The enemies of the U.S. are our enemies, you know, like Hamas, Al Qaeda and Iran,’’ said Victor Alfassi, a butcher in Tel Aviv’s Carmel open-air market. “His dialogue will hurt American interests and the Jewish people.’’
In Israeli politics, the color and chaos of the souks are the boilerplate backdrop for a political campaign to show it has the support of the Israeli street. The catcalling stall workers are overwhelmingly of Middle Eastern origin and view politics through the prism of conservatism, class and ethnicity—a mix that has translated into votes for the Likud.
But that doesn’t mean that everyone in the souk buys the smear stories about Obama’s ties to the Muslim world, or the speculation that he’d favor the Palestinians at Israel’s expense.
Examining the newspaper with the picture of the turbaned senator, Yitzhak Lilian said, “He looks like a Sudanese. But I wouldn’t disqualify him for what he wears.’’
Lilian, 67, who runs a souk shop that sells DVD’s, says he believes that the U.S.-Israel alliance is too tight for any one president to drastically change. What does worry him, though, is the Illinois senator’s lack of experience. “He’s not yet mature enough to lead a superpower that is the leader of the free world,” he said. “Look at our experience with Benjamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak. They were both too young and made rash decisions.’’
Gabriel Sheffer, a professor of political science at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, acknowledged that the initial impression of Obama was that he wasn’t pro-Israeli.
“But now I think it’s changing a little bit,’’ said Gabriel Sheffer, a professor of political science at Hebrew University. “Barack Obama is looked upon more positively by more and more journalists. People are looking at him more favorably, and think that he won’t be so bad for Israel.’’
In recent weeks, Obama has vowed before American Jews and Israelis that he is actually safely within the mainstream of Democratic Party policy on the Israeli-Arab conflict. Sounding like a regurgitation of AIPAC in the interview with Yediot Ahronot, he spoke of an “unshakeable commitment to the security of Israel’’ and to the “shared interests, shared values’’ and “shared history’’ between the two nations.
He’s also gotten some key endorsements from American Jewish figures like former California Congressman Mel Levine, who said the Illinois senator insists that Israel remain a Jewish state.
“There was fear of the unknown, but he has said a few things that have ameliorated that,’’ said Alon Pinkas, a former Israeli consul general in New York.
Public opinion experts in Israel say that the threat of a nuclear Iran ranks among the top Israeli concerns.
“If there’s anything that could rankle Israelis about an Obama presidency, it is the question about whether he would be tough on Iran,’’ said Dahlia Scheindlin, an Israeli election pollster. “Iran plays the role of Israel’s perennial existential threat.’’
And certainly, that’s a concern that cuts across political lines in Israel, from the right-wing Likudniks who might be less inclined to support Obama, to the Israeli left, which might be more likely to embrace him.
Ephraim Sneh, a parliament member from the left-wing Labor Party, said that while he isn’t concerned about the identity of the winner of the race, Israel hopes the next president of the U.S. will stand up to Iran in the same way that Churchill faced Germany during World War II.
In an interview with the Ha’aretz newspaper, Obama adviser Samantha Power—who has since departed the campaign after calling Hillary Clinton a “monster” in an interview with a Scottish newspaper—said the senator supports a direct meeting with the Iranian president to “increase the chance for mobilizing international sanctions.”
Café Tamar on Tel Aviv’s trendy Sheinkin Street is famous as a bastion of old Israeli-left bourgeois, where patrons in their 50’s and 60’s sip cappuccino under posters of former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.
Nava Shrieber, a 60-year-old museum curator, and a friend agreed that Obama’s good looks would help him in the election. They also debated whether it’s more important to have a female or a black president.
Shreiber, argued for Obama because he represents the outsider, while Hillary Clinton represents the “Ivy League.’’
Despite that, Shrieber described Obama as “scary” because of his inexperience in foreign policy. “Especially what he said about Iraq: At first he was squarely behind [the war] and then he faded away. He has charisma, but there’s nothing behind it.’’
At another table, Roni Mordikovich concurred. Even though Obama represents youth, renewal and the American value that anyone can rise to the top regardless of skin color, he thought his candidacy is a potential problem for Israel.
“We don’t know that much about him. We don’t have information. We don’t know what his attitude toward the Arab world is, or Iran. Clinton, from that perspective, has more experience.’’
Back in the Carmel souk, Avner Tzadok said he was amazed at Obama’s surge to the front of the Democratic pack. Just like Israelis aren’t ready for a prime minister of Middle Eastern Jewish descent, Americans won’t be so fast to anoint a black president, said Tzadok, the son of immigrants from Yemen.
“It’s like if a Moroccan were elected prime minister. It will take another five or six terms. Israelis are racist people, and so are the Americans. The whites won’t agree to make a black their boss.’’
The only way Israel gets unwavering support from the US is if a Republican is president. That's a fact. Yet, the Jews of the USA overwhelmingly vote Democratic. Come'on Jews, wake up.
The American people cannot AFFORD anothe Republican Administration...for ANY purpose, which is WHY those who care about the stability of the American way of life, economy, security and its REAL friends and allies -- will vote for a Democrat this Fall...and for the future, not the (failed) past. American patience is not unlimited and it is NOT in the interest of anyone that Americans begin to turn INWARDS...which we will if things don't change FAST. We ALL care about our children and their future...no matter what our ethnicity is. Our allies should CARE about our pain. Turn the page.
The American people would be worse off, as they always are, with a Democratic government - read your history books and stop listening to the news. It was definitely no Democrat who helped Golda Meir. And Barak is a liar and a cheat - anyone with a thidr grade reading level can look that up. He is hot air. Of course, if you believe freedom comes without responsibility, murder of the unborn is permissible, morality is relevant as is truth, then by all means, vote for Barak. OH! I almost forgot... you may want to read up on just how he feels about being an American as opposed to what an American really is.
Fortunately, the majority of Americans are making a choice based upon what is in OUR best interests first -- and, if our friends are REAL, they will support OUR decision. Some of us live our lives through different prisms. Respect for that diversity and diversity-at-large is the defining American hallmark. Name-calling, is not. We ALL pay taxes and by default are entitled to RESPECT. Turn the page.
If you are going to vilify someone, you should at least learn how to spell that person's first name.
A NYT Op-Ed blog response today called Hillary Rodham Clinton the "Tonya Harding" of American politics. Perfect! Priceless!
The Israelis are confused by Obama? Do they have television in Israel? Do they know who this guys' MENTOR, of 20 years, is? Do they know that this MENTOR thinks that Israel is comitting GENOCIDE against the Palestinians? That he DOES HAVE Muslim roots? Now, are you still confused? Well, STOP being confused, and START being afraid. If he gets in, Israel is SCREWED. And just to let you know; I am a Christian.
Barack Obama's minister is just like a few of the fire and brimstone ministers I've had in my life; spiritual, angry, charming and out of step with how I feel about many of the important concepts that I hold dear.
I would hate to be judged by some of the statements I've heard over the years about the state of blacks in America...a subject often used often to stir the congregation to a frenzy just before going off stage.
Barack has said that he wants to increase dialog and ties between our two communities. I may be naive but at least he has some knowledge of the Jewish support given us, when I was a teenager during the civil right struggle. I know Barack would always support Israel just as I do, no matter what world leader he talks to.
I will never forget how duplicitous the Clinton's are. They injected race into this campaign back in South Carolina, when they were on their losing streak. I am still in shock because I absolutely loved him and supported him almost 100% during his impeachment trials.
We were the 10-14% of the electorate that gave him his 60-65& approval ratings in the polls during that time. Then he and his wife, in the name of politics, inject race into this contest and now we have no discussion of their policy and plans.
I never thought to hear Bill Clinton say such things.
I feel totally betrayed by them and if she is our nominee I will vote for McCain.
I don't want a Clinton co-presidency and I can't take another four years of the divisive politics of the last 8 years. NO more scandals!Let's give someone else a chance.
All I've read and heard since Governor Spitzer's scandal, are jokes about Hilary's husband. Who needs the reminders. I sure I don't.
It took some of us forever to deal with his lying to the Grand Jury, even though we never let the the media know how we felt, because we supported him and realized what was going on in our capital and Congress, just as we realize now, perhaps too late, just what the Clinton's are really all about.
__________________________
Political Analyst / info@KatrinaAlliance.org
Re: Joshua Mitnick / Israelis Transfixed...Confused
Barack Obama has shown himself to be Pro-American, that
continues to be a defining factor within the American
Electorate.
Suggested reading; The Constitution of the United
States of America
so middle eastern jews are treated badly by the europian jews, it is like the took racism with them to the middle east, i wonder when this is going to explode and we will have a race war in israel, it is not only the Seffardi jews that are miss treated also and far worst the Flasha are treated badly by all. israel is a racist society that is held together by the existence of external enemy
Obama's Minister Committed "Treason" But When My Father Said the Same Thing He Was a Republican Hero
Posted March 16, 2008 | 04:23 PM (EST)
www.huffingtonpost.com
When Senator Obama's preacher thundered about racism and injustice Obama suffered smear-by-association. But when my late father -- Religious Right leader Francis Schaeffer -- denounced America and even called for the violent overthrow of the US government, he was invited to lunch with presidents Ford, Reagan and Bush, Sr.
Every Sunday thousands of right wing white preachers (following in my father's footsteps) rail against America's sins from tens of thousands of pulpits. They tell us that America is complicit in the "murder of the unborn," has become "Sodom" by coddling gays, and that our public schools are sinful places full of evolutionists and sex educators hell-bent on corrupting children. They say, as my dad often did, that we are, "under the judgment of God." They call America evil and warn of immanent destruction. By comparison Obama's minister's shouted "controversial" comments were mild. All he said was that God should damn America for our racism and violence and that no one had ever used the N-word about Hillary Clinton.
Dad and I were amongst the founders of the Religious right. In the 1970s and 1980s, while Dad and I crisscrossed America denouncing our nation's sins instead of getting in trouble we became darlings of the Republican Party. (This was while I was my father's sidekick before I dropped out of the evangelical movement altogether.) We were rewarded for our "stand" by people such as Congressman Jack Kemp, the Fords, Reagan and the Bush family. The top Republican leadership depended on preachers and agitators like us to energize their rank and file. No one called us un-American.
Consider a few passages from my father's immensely influential America-bashing book A Christian Manifesto. It sailed under the radar of the major media who, back when it was published in 1980, were not paying particular attention to best-selling religious books. Nevertheless it sold more than a million copies.
Here's Dad writing in his chapter on civil disobedience:
If there is a legitimate reason for the use of force [against the US government]... then at a certain point force is justifiable.
And this:
In the United States the materialistic, humanistic world view is being taught exclusively in most state schools... There is an obvious parallel between this and the situation in Russia [the USSR]. And we really must not be blind to the fact that indeed in the public schools in the United States all religious influence is as forcibly forbidden as in the Soviet Union....
Then this:
There does come a time when force, even physical force, is appropriate... A true Christian in Hitler's Germany and in the occupied countries should have defied the false and counterfeit state. This brings us to a current issue that is crucial for the future of the church in the United States, the issue of abortion... It is time we consciously realize that when any office commands what is contrary to God's law it abrogates it's authority. And our loyalty to the God who gave this law then requires that we make the appropriate response in that situation...
Was any conservative political leader associated with Dad running for cover? Far from it. Dad was a frequent guest of the Kemps, had lunch with the Fords, stayed in the White House as their guest, he met with Reagan, helped Dr. C. Everett Koop become Surgeon General. (I went on the 700 Club several times to generate support for Koop).
Dad became a hero to the evangelical community and a leading political instigator. When Dad died in 1984 everyone from Reagan to Kemp to Billy Graham lamented his passing publicly as the loss of a great American. Not one Republican leader was ever asked to denounce my dad or distanced himself from Dad's statements.
Take Dad's words and put them in the mouth of Obama's preacher (or in the mouth of any black American preacher) and people would be accusing that preacher of treason. Yet when we of the white Religious Right denounced America white conservative Americans and top political leaders, called our words "godly" and "prophetic" and a "call to repentance."
We Republican agitators of the mid 1970s to the late 1980s were genuinely anti-American in the same spirit that later Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson (both followers of my father) were anti-American when they said God had removed his blessing from America on 9/11, because America accepted gays. Falwell and Robertson recanted but we never did.
My dad's books denouncing America and comparing the USA to Hitler are still best sellers in the "respectable" evangelical community and he's still hailed as a prophet by many Republican leaders. When Mike Huckabee was recently asked by Katie Couric to name one book he'd take with him to a desert island, besides the Bible, he named Dad's Whatever Happened to the Human Race? a book where Dad also compared America to Hitler's Germany.
The hypocrisy of the right denouncing Obama, because of his minister's words, is staggering. They are the same people who argue for the right to "bear arms" as "insurance" to limit government power. They are the same people that (in the early 1980s roared and cheered when I called down damnation on America as "fallen away from God" at their national meetings where I was keynote speaker, including the annual meeting of the ultraconservative Southern Baptist convention, and the religious broadcasters that I addressed.
Today we have a marriage of convenience between the right wing fundamentalists who hate Obama, and the "progressive" Clintons who are playing the race card through their own smear machine. As Jane Smiley writes in the Huffington Post "[The Clinton's] are, indeed, now part of the 'vast right wing conspiracy.' (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jane-smiley/im-already-against-the-n_b_906... )
Both the far right Republicans and the stop-at-nothing Clintons are using the "scandal" of Obama's preacher to undermine the first black American candidate with a serious shot at the presidency. Funny thing is, the racist Clinton/Far Right smear machine proves that Obama's minister had a valid point. There is plenty to yell about these days.
Frank Schaeffer is a writer and author of "CRAZY FOR GOD-How I Grew Up As One Of The Elect, Helped Found The Religious Right, And Lived To Take All (Or Almost All) Of It Back
For God's sake, stop cutting and pasting crap on here, renatam. No one reads that bilge. One small paragraph is the max, otherwise NO ONE READS IT!!!!!!!!
Democrats = death for Israel and Jews.
Republicans = sustained support and brotherhood with Israel against the Islamofacists who want us all dead, Jew AND gentile.
ISLAMOFASCIST AND JUDEOFASCIST SYMBIOSIS
The Islamofascists, in perpetual quest of greater wealth and power, rant to incite the impoverished Islamic peoples to violence against the notorious injustices of the powerful Judeofascist land robbers. The Judeofascists, in perpetual quest for greater wealth and power, wail and lobby to incite the American People into providing military protection against this persecution by outraged Islamofascists. To add credibility to these incessant rantings and wailings, intermittent battles are performed. The result is that these clever Islamofascists and Judeofascists do gain great wealth and power, at the expense of the Arab, Persian, and American peoples.
The great sacrifice of the wealth and blood of the American People on behalf Israel is all that perpetuates this destructive symbiotic relationship between the Islamofascists and the Judeofascists. But when, in the normal course of the American Cultural War, the Neo-Cons/Neo-Libs are finally expelled by the Reagan Conservatives and Kennedy Liberals from their positions of power, the economic and military support for the Judeofascists will finally end; and that will end the support for the Islamofascists. The end of the era of Neo-Con/Neo-Lib military intervention in the affairs of the Arab and Persian peoples shall be the start of an era of constructive relations with the American People.
The Judeofascists, who live in a glass house surrounded by Islamofascists, could continue to fight for survival militarily, until nuclear armed Israel finally becomes the site of Holocaust II; or, they could resort to land reparations and diplomacy, to finally win for themselves by just and peaceful means, what they cannot win by unjust and violent means. Shall the World be cheering, and the Diaspora wailing; or, shall the World and the Diaspora be cheering?
Although no one has been able to point out Bill Clinton's racist remarks in South Carolina, and even Jackson did not consider his remarks bordering on racist, the Obama machine and the "Manure stirring" pundits did their job. So now we have cogent and actual evidence of what group is the most biased in the U.S. - blacks (afro-americans) in Mississippi vote 92% for Obama and 8% for Clinton! I guess Obama did not stoke the racial fires (sic)..
As far as I am concerned, despite legally fighting against discrimination for more than thirty years, this vote is the most hateful and biased figure that I have ever seen. Backlash anyone?
wow gold
The whites won’t agree to make a black their boss