PORTENTIOUS NEWS FOR JEWS, BARACK MAY ACT LIKE A . . .

Barack Obama’s attitude towards all things Jewish is being questioned by some people in the Jewish community. To be balanced, some of those questioning have become reflexive voters on the right, which is their right but others are independents and Democrats and given the history (world wide and in this country) of attitudes and treatment towards Jews, such questions are reasonable. And they’re more reasonable when the behavior of a fair number of U.S. Presidents and Presidential candidates is to put it mildly, concerning.
First on past presidents: there have been incidents of anti-Semitic tirades by the President himself in the Oval Office. Sitting U.S. Presidents, have by their appearance in an official capacity, paid homage to the genocidal murder of Jews. In one telling instance, a president threatened Israel’s solvency if under attack she did not do as told. Also relevant to the dignity and respect of Israel when an Arab country insidiously blamed “the Zions” for terrorist attacks in their own capital, (by Arab fundamentalist suicide bombers of course), the U.S. President at that time due to timidity, avarice or cowardice, take your choice, said all of nothing.
When a series of major best selling novels (over 70 million sold) told of a prophecy which marked among other things, the end of Jews; one third converted, two thirds destroyed, the President at the time was anything but disapproving, saying in fact the stories left him feeling “stoked”.
As candidates a number of eventual and would be presidents also in the words of an old spiritual “were weighed in the balance and found wanting”. One such candidate kicked off his (successful) presidential campaign at the locale where two Jewish civil rights workers had been tortured to death; echoing the locals attempted efforts to thwart an FBI investigation with the magic words “State’s Rights”.
Another candidate for our highest office embraced the endorsement of a man who said Jews were “deficient”, and were “not deserving of Heaven”, going so far as to speak at the commencement of the University this bigot founded.
If you haven’t guessed the identities of those “gentlemen” whose conduct we've questioned, we’ll enumerate. The anti-Semitic tirades were courtesy of Richard Nixon who claimed the only problem with the Mai Lai massacre (many of us thought the massacre was the problem) was the “dirty rotten Jews of New York”, his exact words. The president who paid homage to the genocidal killers of the Holocaust was Ronald Reagan who visited Bitburg cemetery in Germany in 1985 and, despite full knowledge of the dozens of S.S. members buried there, layed a wreath in their honor. It was Bush ’41 who threatened the Israeli’s loan guarantees if they dared counter attack in any way while Saudi missiles fell on their cities in the first Gulf War, and while Arabs cheered in the streets. And it was Bush ’43 who was "stoked" about the “Left Behind” novels, (which based on the one third, two thirds “solution” to Jews doesn’t leave much wiggle room), and remember this is a man who doesn’t read much.
It was candidate Ronald Reagan who, in 1980, began his first presidential run at Philadelphia, Mississippi, the same of the 1964 torture murders of three civil rights workers, two of whom were Jews. This was long since the FBI had published the mantra of the KKK meeting planning this crime (and many of these same folks were in the audience wildly cheering Mr. Reagan) was “we’re going to get us some Jews tonight”.
In 2000, the then and current Republican candidate John McCain condemned Reverend Jerry Falwell (as well as Louis Farrakhan) as “agents of intolerance” but that was before he realized the beat to which so much of the Republican base marches, and happily accepted an invitation to be commencement speaker at Falwell’s Liberty University in 2006.
Imagine then gang, if any of the aforementioned behavior were attributed to Mr. Obama what would, could, or should the American Jewish community do? To start, they would, could, or should know just what history, behavior, and attitudes he was emulating, namely that . . . of so many, many Republicans. Oh, note to the reasonable, we don’t see even one-third chance of that kind of conversion by Barack Obama.