Obama: Israel's Best Hope

Less remarked-upon in the blowup over Bush's ignorant comments is how Israel has become so crucial to the American Presidential race. As I Jew I believe that Israel is an important ally but their every move is not necessarily how we should base our election. Besides, Barack Obama would be far superior for Israel's security than a militant warrior like John McCain.

…we have had eight years of disaster with respect to our foreign policy, and I have to share with you as an analyst, we have had eight years that have [compromised] the security of the state of Israel.

An administration that has ignored the search for peace in the Middle East to a point where you have chaos in the Palestinian Authority, and you have a sham process called the Annapolis process, in which our Secretary of State, whom I admire personally, travels to region and announces when she gets there that she is bringing no new ideas.

You have an administration that hasn’t engaged in the peace process, and so inherited a bad situation in 2001 and is leaving it in a worse situation in 2008. And you have an administration that has gotten us engaged in a war in Iraq that has not only cost American lives… but it’s now being called the $3 trillion war…And I would share with you that the cost to the security of Israel is incalculable [...]

We have one candidate who is prepared to do diplomacy. Only one candidate…

We have had eight years of no diplomacy, and you have two candidates out there who tell us they don’t want to talk to our enemies…

There is one candidate who believes in diplomacy and his name is Barack Obama.

In fact, it is McCain (and Zell Lieberman) who shows through his belligerence and dangerousness that HE is "unfit to defend America," the words he used to describe Barack Obama yesterday.

Progressive Jewish groups understand this and get the absurdity of the Bush/McCain rhetoric. Here's a message from the progressive policy group J Street.

For seven and a half years, this President's policies have fueled the fires of extremism rather than dampening them. His delusions led us into a disastrous war in Iraq. His disdain for diplomacy has alienated friends and emboldened enemies.

And the results? The forces of extremism are stronger than ever. Al Qaeda is on the move - into Iraq and elsewhere. Moderates are on the defensive from Lebanon to the Palestinian territories and elsewhere. And the United States and Israel are less secure.

This is Bush's legacy. And he has the nerve to accuse us of indulging in "foolish delusions"?

And if you want to get as simplistic as "whose associates like the Jews more", it's actually McCain who has the pastor problem here.

Yesterday I discovered an astonishing audio recording of a sermon, by controversial McCain endorser Pastor John Hagee, in which Hagee elaborates on his view that Hitler and the Nazis were divine agents, sent by God to (with gruesome inefficiency it would seem) chase Europe's Jews towards Palestine. In his 2006 book "Jerusalem Countdown", Hagee proposed that anti-Semitism, and thus the Holocaust, was the fault of Jews themselves - the result of an age old divine curse incurred by the ancient Hebrews through worshiping idols and passed, down the ages, to all Jews now alive. In the sermon Hagee also clarifies a point, on his theological views, that has long concerned me...[Note: excerpt from John Hagee sermon, given probably in the late 1990's - with its themes plied into the John Hagee books "Battle For Jerusalem" (2001, reprinted 2003) and "Jerusalem Countdown" (2006), begins 1:00 minute into the video]

This is a ridiculous story. Obama is favored among American Jews by a wide margin, 61-32. Obama is on TV now hitting back very hard against this Bush/McCain absurdity. "If George Bush and John McCain want to have a debate about protecting America, that is a debate that I will be happy to have, and that is a debate that I will win, because George Bush and John McCain have a lot to answer for."

This was a gift to Obama.