The Jewish Split over Obama

In case anyone failed to catch my drift last week, permit me to reiterate my distaste for yet another protest from the collected Jewish leadership over a supposed Catholic agenda to convert us. When Jews get together at the moment, do you think they complain about how many of our co-religionists we are losing to the Catholic Church? No, they don’t worry about the Catholic Church. They talk about Obama. Let me correct that: they do not exactly talk about Obama. They shout, stamp, and throw things. After Obama’s betrayal of Israel (and Elliot Abrams’ published reports of pre-existing deals between the US and Israel over limited expansion of settlements makes “betrayal” the operative word), the major Jewish organizations are in trouble. Not just fundraising, but jobs are on the line. Except for the Zionist Organization of America, all the major organizations bowed to the 78% Jewish majority for Obama and kowtowed to the president. Rabbis I know who privately abominate Obama for his betrayal do not dare say so in public because they would lose congregants—a lot of congregants. Except for the Reconstructionists, who would follow Obama back to Buchenwald if he led them there, and a few of the Orthodox who never went along with Obama in the first place, every synagogue in the US is split over Obama.

Enlightened opinion has made the avoidance of conflict with the Muslim world its second-most-important goal for the 21st century (the first being gay marriage). A billion and a quarter Muslims are at risk in fragile societies, and the grand test of the efficacy of social engineering will be whether their problems can be defused. It is a rotten job to go around saying, “Es soll gor nisht helfen” (roughly, fuhgeddabouddit), but someone has to do it.

No amount of reality will persuade enlightened opinion that their project is foolish. Iran can smack Obama in the face, the Palestinians can shoot each other all day, Iraq can recede into civil war, Afghanistan can fall to the Taliban, Libya can welcome a mass murderer home as a hero—and enlightened opinion will blame Israel. The Jewish world is reeling from the revival of the old blood libel by Sweden’s leading daily newspaper Aftonbladet. Liberal, enlightened Sweden spawns the sort of slanders that a few years ago would have worried the censors of the Syrian press. Why are the enlightened, liberal editors of Aftonbladet willing to print the worst piece of journalism of the past several decades? Because they feel that Israel must be held accountable for the catastrophes now happening and the greater catastrophes likely to happen in Muslim countries. To allow the Muslims to sort out their own problems at a distance would be to admit a tragic element in human cultures. That notion is what enlightened opinion arose to combat in the first place.

In a much smaller way, Obama is doing the same thing, by placing responsibility for the mess in the Muslim world at Israel’s doorstep: if only Israel could placate Muslim opinion by making visible and painful sacrifices of its own interests, then perhaps the Iranians could be made to act rationally, and so forth. It is unspeakably stupid, but the alternative is to concede that the entire project of the enlightened since the schemes for universal peace of Leibniz and Kant has gone down the drain.

Enlightened opinion sooner will believe that the Israeli army murders Palestinians in order to harvest their organs, then believe in its own redundancy. The stronger the evidence that the Muslim world will not come to terms with the West, the more fanatically enlightened opinion will demand that Israel accept responsibility. Someone must accept responsibility; the Iranian government is too busy suppressing its own voters, the Iraqis are too busy getting on with civil war, the Afghanis are too busy growing opium, the Pakistanis are too busy supporting the Taliban, the Libyans are too busy celebrating a mass murder, and so forth. Are the Muslims recalcitrant, hostile, even murderous? All the more reason to force concessions on Israel! Waxing Muslim rage and distress reveals the entire project of enlightened opinion to hang by a thread. If it should fail, then horrors will ensue to dwarf those of the bloody 20th century.

Jews have been prominent in the project of enlightened opinion, which now has turned upon them and demanded sacrifices that they cannot accept—apart from the extreme secular left of American Jewry. That is tearing the Jewish organizations apart, and possibly many congregations.

In their wisdom and courage, the leaders of the Jewish community sat in council together — and courageously chided the Catholic Church for hoping that we accept Jesus Christ as our savior in the End Times. Excuse me: they wouldn’t be Catholics if they didn’t want everyone to accept Jesus Christ as savior. That’s what the “catholic” in “Catholic Church” means.

The crisis of Jewish liberalism over Obama’s betrayal of Israel is so profound that it remains far from the surface. Most Jews remain in denial. It must out. But until it is fought out, expect more silliness, obfuscation and distraction.