Obama’s embrace of anti-semites is responsible for the anti-Israel radicalism rampant among Democrats today.
For a man who has never been shy about sharing his sanctimonious opinions, former President Barack Obama has been noticeably quiet about anti-Israel anarchists’ takeover of U.S. college campuses.
On Monday, Columbia University — Obama’s alma mater — announced it will not host its university-wide commencement ceremony for this year’s graduating class. That appears to be a response to the pro-Hamas demonstrations that have engulfed the school for weeks. The announcement came days after the university (finally) permitted law enforcement to arrest participants unlawfully occupying a school building.
One would imagine the erection of illegal encampments and harassment of Jewish students at Columbia and other American universities would prompt outcry from any former president. Donald Trump, for example, has repeatedly condemned these demonstrators and their anti-Israeli sentiments. But for Obama, the task is seemingly too difficult.
Obama’s Checkered Past
It goes without saying that if the aforementioned demonstrators were “MAGA Republicans” protesting an Islamic country and harassing Muslim students, legacy media “journalists” would be relentlessly spamming the phone lines and emails of every GOP official in the country asking for condemnation. They will never hold Democrats to the same standard, and their refusal to call out Obama for ignoring the leftist occupation of universities shows it.
Allegations of Obama indulging antisemitism have existed long before he became president. Last year, for example, Tablet Magazine’s David Samuels published a lengthy expose based on a question-and-answer interview with David Garrow, a longtime civil rights historian who authored a biography on Obama in 2017 titled Rising Star.
In his book, Garrow documented an argument between Obama and his longtime Chicago girlfriend, Sheila Miyoshi Jager. It allegedly started because the future president refused to condemn antisemitism and black nationalism.
The dispute occurred after the two reportedly visited “an exhibit at Chicago’s Spertus Institute about the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann,” a Nazi who played a major role in organizing the Holocaust. It was during this time, according to Samuels, that Chicago politics was engulfed in controversy after Steve Cokely, a black mayoral aide, “accused Jewish doctors in Chicago of infecting Black babies with AIDS as part of a genocidal plot against African Americans.”
In 2018, a photo surfaced showing Obama and well-known antisemite Louis Farrakhan smiling together during a 2005 Congressional Black Caucus meeting. Farrakhan — who heads Nation of Islam, a black supremacist group — has claimed that Judaism is a “gutter religion,” whites are a “race of devils,” and Adolf Hitler “was a very great man.”
According to National Review, Farrakhan endorsed Obama during the 2008 Democrat presidential primary and later claimed he met with Obama before he launched his campaign. Conveniently, the picture was suppressed until after Obama’s two terms.
Obama’s associations with antisemites goes back further, to his days as a community organizer in Chicago. The former president was a known associate of Jeremiah Wright, a “reverend” of Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ who has issued numerous racist and vile remarks through the years. Wright is also Obama’s former pastor. Wright married the Obamas and baptized their children.
One of Wright’s most egregious statements came less than a week after the al Qaeda terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. The “pastor” claimed America brought such atrocities on itself because of its foreign policy.
Obama’s Legacy Comes to Fruition
Contrast Obama’s embrace of antisemites like Wright and Farrakhan with the modern Democrat Party’s response to the pro-Hamas anarchy infecting America’s campuses.
Obama’s embrace and tolerance of antisemites and corporate media’s refusal to hold him accountable for it is responsible for the anti-Israel radicalism rampant throughout the modern left. By giving Obama a pass for his controversial behavior and prior associations with people like Wright and Farrakhan, Democrats — willingly or unwillingly — deemed it OK for anti-American radicals who harbor the worst sentiments about Jews to join the party’s ranks.
Coupled with Obama’s pro-Iran foreign policy, this also altered Democrats’ views on Israel. Having previously viewed U.S. support for Israel to be a positive development, today the Democrat Party now opposes Israel’s right to defend itself from Hamas and Iranian-backed attackers to appease their antisemitic wing.
Whether he believes it or not, Obama’s silence on the pro-Hamas movement infecting America’s campuses speaks volumes.
Obey
Article URL : https://thefederalist.com/2024/05/07/the-democrat-partys-antisemitism-went-mainstream-with-barack-obama/