Is Obama an Anti-Semite?

As readers of The BFD would know, I’m hardly Barack Obama’s greatest fan. I regard him as a deeply dishonest, superficially smooth snake-oil salesman, who constantly resorted to blatant race-baiting – with a decade of devastating consequences for the Republic.

But is Obama an anti-Semite?

Despite anti-Semitism being rife on the left in America, as elsewhere, this seems a hard charge to sustain. Especially on such slender evidence.

The words leap out and grab you. After all, in countless pages of prose, no other world leader is characterised by Barack Obama in anything like those terms.

But there it is, in Obama’s recently published memoir, A Promised Land: Nicolas Sarkozy, France’s president from 2007 to 2012, is, Obama tells us, a “quarter Greek Jew”. Little wonder then that Sarkozy has “dark, expressive Mediterranean features”, which resemble the exaggerated, often distorted figures “of a Toulouse-Lautrec painting”.

And little wonder too that he is “all emotional outbursts and overblown rhetoric”, while his conversation, which reflects unbridled ambition and incessant pushiness, “swoops from flattery to bluster to genuine insight”.

Okay…

One might have thought Obama was deliberately directing at the Fifth Republic’s first president with a Jewish heritage the insults notoriously hurled at Benjamin Disraeli, the first person of Jewish birth to become Britain’s prime minister.

Driven by “a tenacity of purpose” that was “a Jewish characteristic”, said Lord Cromer, the Conservative prime minister, with his swarthy “Oriental features”, was consumed by an “addiction” to the “passionate outbursts” and “excesses of flattery” that were the hallmarks of his “nimble-witted” race.

Well, given that Ashkenazi Jews in particular are well-over-represented in high IQ scores, “nimble-witted” would seem like an accurate compliment. In fact, the intellectual contributions of Jews to Western society and culture are immense.

But it’s not Obama’s characterisation that’s the issue, as I see it – but the fact that the gimlet-eyed inquisitors of the left so obviously let it slide.

It is, however, indisputable that had Sarkozy’s flaw been that he was black, gay or Muslim, each with its associated stereotypes, the slur would have unleashed storms of protest. And assailed by hordes of distressed employees, Penguin Random House, the book’s publisher, would have been forced into grovelling retractions.

In reality, the only roar was that of a deafening silence. From The New York Times to The Washington Post and beyond, not one of the gushing reviews considered Obama’s statement even worth mentioning.

Imagine, instead, that Trump had tweeted that Sarkozy is “an incessantly pushy quarter Greek Jew”. The screeching outrage would have been deafening. Months of op-eds would have spewed from the NYT and CNN. Rachel Maddow would have dissolved in tears. Cities would have burned.

In part, that reflects the normalisation of casual anti-Semitism on the “progressive” side of politics. Just how far that process has gone was thrown starkly into relief last year when The New York Times’ international edition printed a cartoon of Benjamin Netanyahu that could have been lifted from the Nazis’ Der Sturmer. A simple “error of judgment” made by an overworked staff member, the paper claimed.

But as the Times’ own columnist, Bret Stephens, asked, how could it be that the paper’s editors, who were “hyper-alert to nearly every conceivable expression of prejudice, from mansplaining to racial microaggressions to transphobia”, now found “even the most blatant expressions of anti-Semitism almost undetectable”?

“The reason”, he went on to argue, “is the almost torrential criticism of Israel and the mainstreaming of anti-Zionism” in the left-leaning media, “which has become so common that people have been desensitised to its inherent bigotry”[…]

Ultimately, in mirroring those trends, Obama’s slur on Sarkozy may reflect little more than a form of educated thoughtlessness — a thoughtlessness that pervades the “progressive” milieu he inhabits.

The Australian

Was it really a “slur”, though? I’d argue not. Certainly not PC, but PC is lying garbage anyway.

For once, I’m giving Obama a pass.

On the other hand, the staggering hypocrisy and bigotry of the left has once again been made glaringly obvious for any who care to see.

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