Last week, a New York fashion model was dropped by her talent agency, Elite New York, after she uploaded a social media post comparing Israel to Nazi Germany. I almost felt sorry for the model. She appears to have a limited understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and was simply regurgitating previous brain-dead iterations of the progressive platform.
How was she to know that this time a level of sheepishness was in order: that in the face of Hamas’ gob smacking barbarity, it is the Left that is on the defensive? That Rashida Tlaib defending a Hamas chant is not quite as mainstream as she might have thought? That just 13 per cent of Americans blame Israel for civilian casualties in Gaza?
But the model is not the only one who didn’t get the memo. In an interview with the podcast Pod Save America, former President Barack Obama engaged in an act of moral turpitude so shameless that even his own former supporters are calling him out.
In short clip from a discussion around the current conflict in the Middle East, in which Israel is engaged in an attempt to eliminate the Hamas butchers who murdered, raped and immolated 1,400 Israelis, Obama insists upon the following:
“If there’s any chance of us being able to act constructively to do something, it will require an admission of complexity and maintaining what on the surface may seem contradictory ideas – that what Hamas did was horrific, and there’s no justification for it, and what is also true is that the occupation and what’s happening to Palestinians is unbearable… And what is true is that there are people right now who are dying, who have nothing to do with what Hamas did.”
Further, he asserts that “nobody’s hands are clean, that all of us are complicit to some degree,” including himself: “Was there something else I could have done?” The clip ends with Obama urging people to get off social media – because if you don’t understand what people you disagree with are talking about, “you can’t save that child without their help.”
Obama knows who his audience is: progressives in Hollywood, the media, and academia. It’s where the woke mindset disseminates, replacing a worldview based on right vs. wrong with a worldview based on the powerful vs. powerless. Obama speaks about anti-Semitism as “a history of the Jewish people that may be dismissed” unless someone tells you about it: in other words, about the past. As people congregate around the world to chant “Gas the Jews”, the former president speaks of anti-Semitism as ancient history.
The three minutes of Obama’s analysis are suffused with equivalency between the barbarity of Hamas and the attempt by Israel to contain it and prevent it from happening again. The Palestinians dying now as a result of Hamas’s barbarity against its own people are on the other side of a moral dilemma for Obama.
Even as president, Obama was obsessed with what he called Iran’s “equities,” with forcing US allies in the Middle East to “share the neighborhood with Iran.” He got his wish: Shani Louk’s broken body is what sharing the neighborhood with Iran looks like. He’s right about one thing, and it’s his own culpability in October 7.
There are progressives I know and am close to who genuinely believe that a ceasefire in Gaza right now is the anti-war position to prevent more death and destruction in the Middle East. They are wrong. A ceasefire is how you signal to America’s enemies that Jewish life isn’t just cheap, but free.
If you believe America should come first for American leaders, which I do, you should want America’s allies to be strong and independent, and you should want strong and independent countries to be our allies. Obama’s mistake is not just that he has confused power for crime and weakness for virtue. It’s that he wanted America’s allies to be weak so he could control them, and he was willing to empower America’s greatest adversaries to accomplish that goal. The Jews – both the Jewish state and Jewish Americans – are nothing more than collateral damage.
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