Obama and the Jews

by Burt Prelutsky

During the presidential campaign, a lot of people insisted that Obama was really a Muslim pretending to be a Christian.

I wasn't one of them.

I did figure, though, that if my name was Barack Hussein Obama and I was going to run for president a mere seven years after 9/11, I wouldn't admit I was a Muslim, either.

On the other hand, I, personally, would have sooner trusted a Muslim who'd been attending a mosque in Dearborn for 20 years than a Christian who'd been attending a racist, anti-American church in Chicago for all that time.

Anybody, after all, can claim to be a Christian.

The proof, in the words of that fabulous effing wordsmith, Joe Biden, is in the pudding, and when I learned that among Obama's friends and mentors were such notorious anti-Semites as Rev. Wright, Louis Farrakhan, Rashid Khalidi and Father Pfleger, it certainly kick-started my suspicions about his religious convictions. Still, as I saw it, when in Chicago, you do as Chicagoans do. And, that being the case, I figured that in such swampland, even if a saint were to wade into Chicago politics, he would eventually be knee-deep in snakes and alligators named Tony Rezko, Richard Daley and Bill Ayers.



However, once Obama was elected president and immediately jetted off to Egypt and Turkey to announce his kinship with the followers of Islam, all the while bad-mouthing America, I confess I began to feel a tad queasy. It didn't help that the self-anointed one seemed to think that he could make Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong-il and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, heel solely by his mere presence.

Heck, judging by his lack of success in such matters, I'm willing to wager that even after all these months he hasn't managed to housebreak Bo. Speaking of which, I hate to think what the carpet in the Lincoln Bedroom looks like these days.

Like most Americans, I believe in giving a guy the benefit of the doubt, but once Mr. Doubt grabs his hat and scoots out the door, leaving me holding the check, I really hate feeling like a sucker.

The fact that so many other Americans feel the same way is reflected in Obama's free fall in the polls.

His recent rhetoric concerning Jerusalem and his subsequent boorish behavior towards Prime Minister Netanyahu convinces me that in his heart, at least, Obama is an Islamic. The anger and contempt that he has voiced, and that Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton have voiced on his behalf, over Jerusalem's zoning policy is outrageous and contemptible.

The Jews announce they plan to build 1200 housing units in Jerusalem and our president goes positively apeshit, but Hamas fires thousands of rockets into Israel and he doesn't say a word about it!

Clearly, it's none of our business whether or not Israel builds homes. Obviously if they weren't needed, they wouldn't be built. But there are other equally basic truths to consider. For one thing, Jerusalem is Israel's capital. How would we feel if a foreign country told us whether or not we could erect buildings in Washington, D.C.?

For another thing, it is Judaism's holiest city and always has been.

Three, it plays no part in Islamic history. Muhammad never even set foot in the place, meaning that it is one of the few locales in that part of the world where he and his ancient cronies never beheaded anyone.

Four, the only reason that Muslims now lay claim to it is in order to make trouble, which, as you may have noticed, is pretty much the only thing they've managed to produce over the past thousand years.

This brings us to what countless American presidents and secretaries of state have persisted in calling a peace process. And who would have ever guessed that all of those rather sober-sided ladies and gentlemen possessed such a marvelous sense of whimsy?

There is, as all rational people realize, no such thing as a peace process in the Middle East. There are merely two opposing sides.

On one side are those dedicated to wiping Israel off the map, which in fact they've already done on their own maps, and who also just happen to be America's sworn enemies.

On the other side is Israel, a western-style democracy that is home to over a million Arabs, a nation that foolishly keeps trying to bribe the opposition by handing over its legal property, only to discover that its enemies are not bought off as easily as Democratic congressmen.

Speaking of American politicians, I'm aware that a lot of people assumed that Obama would be a strong ally of Israel's because he had people like Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod in his inner-circle, and that the outer-circle was filled with such heavy-hitters as Charles Schumer, Barney Frank, Arlen Specter, Henry Waxman, Barbara Boxer, Dianne Feinstein, Brad Sherman, Al Franken, Bernie Sanders and more than 30 other Jewish congressmen and senators.

But there really is no excuse for such gullibility in 2010. Anyone who doesn't understand that these days, Jewish politicians are liberals first, last and always, and have greater allegiance to Barack Obama and Karl Marx than to Thomas Jefferson and Moses, just hasn't been paying attention.

I have no way of knowing if they'll ever find space for Obama on Mount Rushmore, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if some day there's an Obama Boulevard in downtown Tehran.

A while back I wrote a line that is truer and more pertinent now than when I first wrote it: I sincerely hope that when Obama goes in for his annual checkup, the doctors at Bethesda will do a brain scan. For surely there must be something terribly wrong with a man who seems to be far more concerned with a Jew building a house in Israel than with Muslims building a nuclear bomb in Iran.

Burt Prelutsky has been a humor columnist for the L.A. Times and a movie critic for Los Angeles magazine. He is the author of Conservatives are from Mars (Liberals are from San Francisco).