Obama "is still the same anti-American leftist he was before becoming our president"

From Norman Podhoretz's WSJ piece:

And so it came about that a faithful scion of the political culture of the '60s left is now sitting in the White House and doing everything in his power to effect the fundamental transformation of America to which that culture was dedicated and to which he has pledged his own personal allegiance.

I disagree with those of my fellow conservatives who maintain that Mr. Obama is indifferent to "the best interests of the United States" (Thomas Sowell) and is "purposely" out to harm America (Rush Limbaugh). In my opinion, he imagines that he is helping America to repent of its many sins and to become a different and better country.

But I emphatically agree with Messrs. Limbaugh and Sowell about this president's attitude toward America as it exists and as the Founding Fathers intended it.

That is why my own answer to the question, "What Happened to Obama?" is that nothing happened to him. He is still the same anti-American leftist he was before becoming our president, and it is this rather than inexperience or incompetence or weakness or stupidity that accounts for the richly deserved failure both at home and abroad of the policies stemming from that reprehensible cast of mind.

^

Obama believes that the Palestinians are like the blacks in America

Norman Podhoretz is asked by Deborah Solomon if he is

...sounding a note of disapproval in the title of your new book, “Why Are Jews Liberals?”

It’s more in sorrow than in anger. I’ve been asked this question a million times, especially by non-Jews...

Why is it such a puzzle to you? Anti-Semitism and the Nazi Party were invented by the political right.

It’s a little more complicated than that...there’s been a complete reversal of roles. Whereas the right was once full of anti-Semites, since the Six-Day War of 1967, the right — and especially the religious right — has become more pro-Israel, and the left — as exemplified by intellectuals like Noam Chomsky and Gore Vidal and a magazine like The Nation — has become more hostile...The ideology of the left, in the last 50 years roughly, has represented the Palestinians as a kind of dark-skinned oppressed people like the blacks in this country. Obama believes that.

You mean that the Palestinians are oppressed by Jewish settlements?

It’s a crazy idea, but the Palestinians have been identified with the putative victims of European colonialism. Obama has now returned to the old idea that Israel is the main obstacle to peace in the Middle East.

Podhoretz Pokes Obama

...the Obama administration is already reverting to the old pre-Bush assumptions that have repeatedly been discredited in practice: that Israeli “intransigence” is the main obstacle to ending the conflict with the Palestinians; that “restarting” the “peace process” therefore requires putting the onus back on Israel; and that this in turn necessitates forcing Israel back to the 1967 borders. In other words, Jerusalem must be redivided and the major centers of Jewish population in the West Bank that Bush had promised would remain part of Israel must also be evacuated and the West Bank as a whole be made Judenrein....if there is a threat to Israel coming from Obama, it is that, having eschewed the use of force by the United States, he will follow through on his Vice President’s declaration that the Israelis would be “ill-advised” to attack the Iranian nuclear sites and will prevent them from doing the job themselves.

Read it all.

Exchange of Opinions on Jerusalem

From Commentary -

To the Editor:

Norman Podhoretz argues that the Jews are a “chosen people,” adducing the fact that they have survived throughout history and excelled in manifold ways. He further maintains that Jewish chosenness—the “scandal of particularity,” in the formulation he cites of Christian theologians—is regarded by many Jews themselves as a burden, not a gift. Finally, because of the Jews’ particularity, Jerusalem must forever remain in their possession [“Jerusalem: The Scandal of Particularity,” July-August].

I might remind Mr. Podhoretz that the idea of chosenness has historically been the source of much trouble in the world. Today, suicide bombers and fundamentalists of all kinds no doubt consider themselves chosen. And our own local version of chosenness, what some call “American exceptionalism,” has led to hubristic blunders like the war in Iraq. As for chosenness being a burden, that notion, too has a dubious legacy in the “white man’s burden” that was invoked to rationalize colonialism in Africa and Asia.

Jerusalem, which is regarded by Jews, Muslims, and Christians as a holy city, might one day be properly considered for international status. Demographics, in any case, will play a large role in determining the city’s future, especially as its Arab population continues to grow. For Jerusalem to remain the undivided capital of the Jewish state, as Mr. Podhoretz insists it must, will necessarily involve undemocratic practices, ethnic cleansing, or a Berlin Wall-like blight cutting through the city.

Garr Cutler
Eugene, Oregon

_____________


To the Editor:
I read Norman Podhoretz’s article on Jerusalem with great interest. His argument that Jerusalem should remain the undivided capital of Israel is characteristically trenchant, and his courage in challenging the arguments of lifelong friends like Hillel Halkin and Walter Laqueur is admirable. But I differ with him about the grounds on which his own position should be justified. It is not just that the “hopes of peace” between Israel and the Palestinians “are illusory” at present. Nor need the Jews’ “scandalous particularity,” as symbolized by Jerusalem, be invoked. Universal values alone justify Israel’s holding on to the city.

The capital of a nation represents its sovereignty. To ask of Israel to permit two capitals—West Jerusalem for the Jewish people and East Jerusalem for the Palestinian people—is to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the Jewish state, as well as to intensify the prospect for armed struggle between the two peoples. The bifurcation of Jerusalem along ethnic and religious lines would be no more reasonable than the separation of Washington, D.C. along the geographic curve of a white Northwest and an African-American Southeast.

Irving Louis Horowitz
New Brunswick, New Jersey

_____________


To the Editor:
In arguing that Jerusalem should remain unified under Israeli sovereignty, Norman Podhoretz rests his case on the idea of Jewish “chosenness.” This is a strange tack for him to take, given how troubling that idea is to many people. The argument for an undivided Jerusalem that is more likely to be acceptable to non-Jews is that there can be no better, more responsible caretaker for the holy city than Israel.

In Gaza, the Palestinians have shown a total inability to govern themselves, much less to show basic consideration for the needs of others. The United Nations has time and time again revealed itself to be an ineffective peacekeeping force. Israel is the one party that can truly govern Jerusalem in a way that, while not perfect, is nonetheless beneficial to all its residents. The past 40 years of Israel’s stewardship have been years of unprecedented development not only for the city as a whole but for the Jewish and Arab communities in it alike. This, combined with the city’s rich Jewish heritage, should be justification enough to any objective outsider for Jerusalem to remain united under Israeli rule.

Shalom Freedman
Jerusalem, Israel

_____________


Norman Podhoretz writes:

Garr Cutler simply repeats what I wrote about the discomfort with, or outright hostility to, the idea of chosenness felt by many liberal Jews—and most, if not all, of their non-Jewish counterparts. Moreover, his brief for their attitude rests on blithely blaming the doctrine of chosenness for a number of phenomena he considers evil, none of which bears any relation to the biblical concept or how it has been interpreted by Jews throughout the centuries.

The idea of “American exceptionalism,” for example, had nothing to do one way or the other with chosenness. According to the late Seymour Martin Lipset, perhaps the leading authority on the subject, “the major question subsumed in the concept became why the United States was the only industrialized country which did not have a significant socialist movement or Labor party.” Thus, “American exceptionalism” had even less to do with the invasion of Iraq—which, incidentally, some of us regard not as a “hubristic blunder” but as a noble and strategically sound undertaking.

Does this mean that we think we are shouldering what Kipling, in the poem he wrote in 1899 about the American takeover of the Philippines, called the “White Man’s Burden”? If so, we are making a great mistake, since it is not we but the opponents of what the United States is trying to do in Iraq who will find their views supported by Kipling’s poem. For the message of “The White Man’s Burden” was that the American effort to bring freedom and prosperity to the Philippines was doomed to fail:

Take up the White Man’s burden—
The savage wars of peace—
Fill full the mouth of Famine
And bid the sickness cease;
And when your goal is nearest
The end for others sought,
Watch sloth and heathen Folly
Bring all your hopes to nought.

In any case, the burden that chosenness imposed on the Israelites of the Hebrew Bible and their descendants was their own need to obey the Law, not—as in Islam—to spread their faith to others by the sword. Which brings me to Mr. Cutler’s inclusion of suicide bombers on his list of the evils that he imagines have flowed from the doctrine of chosenness. If, as he says, the Islamofascist suicide bombers “consider themselves chosen,” then what they are chosen for, obviously, is death.

Here, by contrast, is what the Israelites are told by God in Deuteronomy: “I have set before you life and death . . . : therefore choose life.” God goes on to identify life with obedience to the Law whose observance was entailed by His choice of this people as the mysterious instrumentality through which it would at the end of days be accepted by all mankind —again, voluntarily, and not by the sword. In the meantime, as the Israelites were further instructed in the meaning of chosenness by the prophet Amos speaking in the name of God: “You only have I known of all the families of the earth: therefore I will punish you for all your iniquities.”

Both Irving Louis Horowitz and Shalom Freedman seem to be under the impression that I was offering the idea of chosenness as a rationale for keeping Jerusalem united. But what I was actually doing was using it to back up my prediction that Israel would survive the determination of its enemies to wipe it off the map, and that a united Jerusalem would remain its capital. The arguments Mr. Horowitz and Mr. Freedman offer in the service of helping that prediction to come true are certainly sound, and they also demonstrate why Mr. Cutler’s proposal to internationalize Jerusalem lies moldering in the mass grave in which the many “peace plans” incorporating it have ignominiously been buried.

On Norman Podhoretz & Jewish Power

Norman Podhoretz has published a new book:

World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism, Doubleday.

In a review, I found this:-

...it is worth pondering why Jews have played such a prominent part in the short history of neoconservatism, despite the fact that most American Jews would still regard themselves as liberals. Much has already been written on this topic, some of it scurrilous; conspiracies and so forth. Could it have something to do with an old attraction to utopian visions of universal liberty, which once drew many Jews to the left? Or with the traditional appeal of strong, benevolent empires, from the monarchy of Franz Joseph to George W. Bush's republic, as shields against bigots, racists, and tyrants? Of course, the specter of 1938, of not nipping a mortal danger in the bud, has special resonance among many Jews. Then there is the matter of Israel. Podhoretz, for one, felt deeply betrayed by the American left, not to mention "the Europeans," who became critical of the Jewish state after the 1967 war, and even more so after the Yom Kippur War in 1973.

But none of these factors quite explains the obsession with power, specifically US power, and the constant angst that it is being undermined by an elite of treacherous liberals. In his latest book, Podhoretz refers to the "Vietnam syndrome" as an example of "neo-isolationism" and "pacifist sentiment" that are supposedly rife in "the elite institutions of American culture." This elite appears to be made up largely of that old bugbear of the paranoid right: clever people in New York who run the media, that "effete corps of impudent snobs," in the words of former Vice President Spiro Agnew. To shore up US power, it is essential to mobilize the common, decent, right-thinking people of America against this decadent elite...



...in his famous essay "My Negro Problem—and Ours."...When Podhoretz grew up in Brooklyn, the common assumption was that Jews were rich and Negroes were persecuted. This was not how things looked to Podhoretz on the playground of his local public school, where poor Jewish boys like him were regularly being beaten up by Negroes: "There is a fight, they win, and we retreat, half whimpering, half with bravado. My first experience of cowardice." Negroes, he goes on, "made one feel inadequate. But most important of all, they were tough, beautifully, enviably tough, not giving a damn for anyone or anything.... This is what I envied and feared in the Negro...." And then there were the effete snobs, "the writers and intellectuals and artists who romanticize the Negroes, and pander to them," and "all the white liberals who permit the Negroes to blackmail them into adopting a double standard of moral judgment...."

The key to Podhoretz's politics seems to me to lie right there: the longing for power, for toughness, for the Shtarker who doesn't give a damn about anyone or anything, and hatred of the contemptible, cowardly liberals with their pandering ways and their double standards. Since Podhoretz, himself a bookish man, can never be a Shtarker, his government must fill that role, and not give a damn about anyone or anything. And not only the US government, but Israel too. Arik Sharon was a typical Shtarker, and thus much admired. Bibi Netanyahu tries hard to be a Shtarker.

That's something to mull about.