Obama Is Scapegoating The Jews To Sell His Iran Agreement

Yid with Lid blog

August 9, 2015

Antisemitism is a label rarely used in these pages because casually using the term lessens the impact of a label which should denote something horrible.  So when the term anti-Semitic is used below to label some of the president's actions in selling his P5+1 Iran deal please understand that it is not a claim used cavalierly.

President Obama’s July 31 phone call organized by the Anti-Israel group J Street and other progressive Jewish groups could be summed up in one sentence. Please help because, those rich people are helping those warmongering Jews to fighting this wonderful Iran deal because they don’t like me and they want war just like they did in Iraq

In the 20 minute phone call Obama said over and over that opponents of the Iran deal come from the same “array of forces that got us into the Iraq war,” he said a “bunch of billionaires who happily finance super PACs” are “putting the squeeze on members of Congress.” 

The message was clear to the Jewish participants, William Daroff Senior Vice President for Public Policy & Director of the Washington office of The Jewish Federations of North America tweeted during the meeting “Jews are leading effort to kill #Irandeal. ‘Same people opposing the deal led us into Iraq war,’" and followed with “Canard: Jews got us into Iraq War.”

The claim that belies the facts as the Israeli government recommended against the Iraq War. However since the Iraq war began anti-Semites such a Pat Buchanan have been pushing the false meme that the Jews pushed America into war. Apparently Obama agrees with that meme. 

In a meeting with a hand picked list of Jewish leaders, Lee Rosenberg of AIPAC questioned Obama's statement comparing people who object to the Iran deal to those who supported the invasion of Iraq because many anti-Semites claim the Jews pushed Bush into invading Iraq. Obama explained that Netanyahu supported the Iraq invasion (true). What the president left out was that the prime minister at the time Ariel Sharon strongly urged Bush not to invade. Obama also forgot to mention that his vice president Joe Biden, both of his secretaries of state Kerry and Clinton, and his biggest ally in the senate Minority Leader Harry Reid all supported the invasion of Iraq in congress and now support his flawed Iraq deal.

At the meeting with the Jewish ‘leadership’ Obama said that if the deal were to fall apart, he would likely face calls within three to six months to use military strikes to stop Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. 

In a conference call with over 10,000 Americans Jews last week, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu pointed out how illogical Obama's "deal or war" argument is:

"Yet there’s one claim that is the most outrageous: that those who oppose this deal want war. That’s utterly false. We in Israel don’t want war. We want peace. Because it’s we who are on the front lines. We face Iran’s terror on three borders. We face tens of thousands of Iranian rockets aimed at all our cities. We face Iran, whose regime repeatedly calls for the destruction of the Jewish state. We face Iran whose terrorist proxies try to kill Jews every day. "

French diplomatic official Jacques Audibert, who amongst other things was leader of the French diplomatic team negotiating with Iran as part of the P5+1 group disagrees. Earlier this month, he met with Democrat Loretta Sanchez and Republican Mike Turner, both top members of the House Armed Services Committee, to discuss the Iran deal. The U.S. ambassador to France, Jane Hartley, was also in the room. According to both lawmakers, Audibert expressed support for the deal overall, but also directly disputed Kerry’s claim that a Congressional rejection of the Iran deal would result in the worst of all worlds, the collapse of sanctions and Iran racing to the bomb without restrictions. “He basically said, if Congress votes this down, there will be some saber-rattling and some chaos for a year or two, but in the end nothing will change and Iran will come back to the table to negotiate again and that would be to our advantage,” Sanchez told me in an interview. “He thought if the Congress voted it down, that we could get a better deal.”

During his speech at American University last Wednesday president Obama again tried to scapegoat the Jews. He said, “

So this deal is not just the best choice among alternatives, this is the strongest nonproliferation agreement ever negotiated, and because this is such a strong deal, every nation in the world that has commented publicly, with the exception of the Israeli government, has expressed support.”

Most of the Gulf States opposing the deal have done so directly to the U.S. without making their objections public. However the Saudi Kingdom has made public statements indicating their objection to the deal.

A member of the Saudi Arabian royal family, Prince Bandar bin Sultan told Lebanon’s Daily Star the deal would allow Iran to acquire a nuclear bomb and would “wreak havoc in the region." The prince also told the Daily Star, "Saudi Arabia and the Gulf powers are prepared to take military action without American support after the Iran nuclear deal"

Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi journalist with ties to the royal family, recently said that because of the Iran deal the kingdom is pursuing nuclear weapons.

However it is more convenient for Obama to set up the Jewish State as the "bad guy" to his progressive base.

Matt Bai of Yahoo news reported that the day after his meeting with Jewish leaders, he disregarded all their arguments, tweeting out the president’s words, "When I sit down with a group of Jewish leaders, just as when I sit down with members of Congress I do not hear back credible arguments on the other side. I hear talking points that have been prepared”

Obama should have known the P5+1 deal was bad when Congressman Steve Israel who supported J Street and almost every other anti-Israel program Obama had come up with during his presidency, announced that he would opposed the deal.

When Chuck Schumer made his announcement, even though it was planned in a way that would hurt Obama the least, near the end of the first GOP primary debate when political reporters were feasting on the two debates, the progressives flipped and accused the senator of dual loyalty.

In an editorial, Tablet Magazine picked up on the attacks on Schumer and accused the White House of using “anti-Jewish incitement” in blasting Schumer over his decision.

“What we increasingly can’t stomach—and feel obliged to speak out about right now—is the use of Jew-baiting and other blatant and retrograde forms of racial and ethnic prejudice as tools to sell a political deal, or to smear those who oppose it. Accusing Senator Schumer of loyalty to a foreign government is bigotry, pure and simple. Accusing Senators and Congressmen whose misgivings about the Iran deal are shared by a majority of the U.S. electorate of being agents of a foreign power, or of selling their votes to shadowy lobbyists, or of acting contrary to the best interests of the United States, is the kind of naked appeal to bigotry and prejudice that would be familiar in the politics of the pre-Civil Rights Era South.

This use of anti-Jewish incitement as a political tool is a sickening new development in American political discourse, and we have heard too much of it lately—some coming, ominously, from our own White House and its representatives. Let’s not mince words: Murmuring about “money” and “lobbying” and “foreign interests” who seek to drag America into war is a direct attempt to play the dual-loyalty card. It’s the kind of dark, nasty stuff we might expect to hear at a white power rally, not from the President of the United States—and it’s gotten so blatant that even many of us who are generally sympathetic to the administration, and even this deal, have been shaken by it.”

Here’s a truth none of the Democrats who are scapegoating the Jews will accept. A Quinnipiac University Poll released last Monday reports that American voters oppose the Iran deal by almost a two to one. 57% - 28% margin. Republicans oppose the deal by a huge 86-3% margin, but Independents also oppose the deal by a huge 55-29% margin. A CBS poll released Tuesday had similar results. It could be argued that it is the Democrats who are being partisan because they are the only group supporting the deal (by 52%-32%) which many believe is designed to cement the foreign policy legacy of a president from the Democratic Party.

What that poll says to me is that the American people want the president to stop scapegoating the Jews, stop calling all of his opponents disloyal, stop making false claims of war being the only other option, and go get us a real agreement that ensures our peace, an American peace.

UPDATE:  President Barack Obama accused Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of meddling in American politics, saying he could not remember a time in which a foreign leader had interfered as much in American affairs.

In an interview on Sunday, CNN‘s Fareed Zakaria asked Obama if it was “appropriate of a foreign head of government to inject himself into an American affairs,” to which the president responded that he “does not recall such an example.”

But I have an example, when Obama sent his campaign experts to Israel in an attempt guarantee a Netanyahu loss during the last Israeli election.