(Reuters photo: Larry Downing)

A religious leftist, he breaks down Bible believers into two categories: fools and liars.

Barack Obama has done his best for nearly eight years to undermine the state of Israel. He’s signed a treaty that enshrines an Iranian path to a nuclear weapon while funding their global terrorist activities to the tune of tens of billions of dollars. He’s repeatedly undercut Israel’s image on the world stage, labeling Israel a mere outgrowth of the Holocaust and suggesting that Israeli intransigence stands as the chief obstacle to peace. He’s ushered Benjamin Netanyahu out the side door of the White House, attempted to undercut the prime minister’s speech before Congress, and then deployed an election team to Israel to try to defeat him in an election. Obama has tried to cut weapons shipments to Israel in the middle of a war against terrorists, forced Israel to apologize for stopping weapons shipments to Hamas terrorists, and funded the Palestinian terrorist unity government with American taxpayer dollars.


Nonetheless, Israel has survived.

Actually, Israel has thrived.


It’s thrived, in part, because Obama’s absolute incompetence has created an alliance of convenience between Israel and its erstwhile enemies. Saudi Arabia is more fearful of a nuclear Iran than of Israel; Egypt worries more about the Muslim Brotherhood than about Israel; Jordan frets over the Palestinians more than it does over Israel. Even the Palestinian Authority is more concerned about Hamas and ISIS than about Israel.


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That means that there’s been very little pressure on Israel to make concessions to Palestinian terrorists in recent years.

Until now.

Obama’s animus for the state of Israel stretches beyond the typical internationalist leftist view of Israel as a colonialist outpost, a cancer growing in the heart of the Muslim Middle East. Most internationalist leftists think that Israel is the cause of Muslim ire, that if Israel were to disappear, suddenly the Muslim lands surrounding it would view the rest of the world with fresh, dewy eyes. This is the same general philosophy that blames the West for the problem of Islamic violence, that suggests that income maldistribution breeds discontent that in turn breeds terrorism.

Obama may think that, but that’s not what drives him.


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Something deeper drives Obama when it comes to Israel. Why else would he spend the last few weeks of his presidency throwing gasoline on Israel and then lighting a match?

Some might suggest ideological kinship with Islam. Obama isn’t a Muslim, of course, but he has bragged often and loudly about his heartfelt connection to the religion — and Muslims the world over, by polling data, see Israel as the chief threat to global peace. There are points of commonality between Obama’s philosophy and that of Muslim hardliners: Both see the Crusades as the instigation of the Islamic world’s war on the West; both believe that Israel has destroyed Muslim solidarity in the Middle East; both attribute democratic feeling to Islamist movements.


Or perhaps even that explanation is insufficient: It doesn’t tell us why Obama is so eager to hand over control of Middle Eastern policy to Vladimir Putin and Russia, for example.

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Here’s the most plausible explanation: Obama despises Israel because at root, Obama despises the traditional Judeo-Christian underpinning of Western civilization. He breaks down Bible believers into two categories: fools and liars. The fools are the “bitter clingers,” the idiot masses who fall into racism and xenophobia and Bible jabber because they’re poor and stupid. The liars are the self-interested characters who want to do what they want to do while citing the Bible for their support.

Real Christians are leftists — as Obama said in 2006, “I believed and still believe in the power of the African-American religious tradition to spur social change. . . . The black church understands in an intimate way the biblical call to feed the hungry and clothe the naked and challenge powers and principalities.”

Obama, then, is a religious leftist. He prefers a form of Christianity that rejects biblical centrality and that replaces the Bible with leftism at its heart. It’s not a coincidence that Obama attended Jeremiah Wright’s church for two decades. Wright preached hatred against Israel throughout his tenure, calling it an “apartheid” state and labeling all settlements “illegally occupied territories.” He labeled Jesus “a Palestinian” and argued that “the Palestinian people have had the Europeans come and take their country. . . . The youth in Ferguson and the youth in Palestine have united together to remind us that the dots need to be connected.”

You can take Obama out of Jeremiah Wright’s church, but you can’t take Jeremiah Wright’s church out of Obama.

Obama strongly mirrors that language himself, complaining about the “desperation and disorder of the powerless, how it twists the lives of children on the streets of Jakarta or Nairobi in much the same way as it does the lives of children on Chicago’s South Side.” To Obama, Bible believers who utilize religion as an excuse to cover for the real class oppression are merely cynical manipulators. You can take Obama out of Jeremiah Wright’s church, but you can’t take Jeremiah Wright’s church out of Obama.

And what is the ultimate repository of such manipulation of religion? The Jewish state. The Jews of Israel, Obama believes, are aggressors, using biblical writ as an excuse for oppression, hiding behind the Bible when it’s really naked self-interest at work. That’s why Obama stated at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial in Japan that “no religion has been spared from believers who have claimed their faith as a license to kill. . . . How easily we learn to justify violence in the name of some higher cause.”

#related#To Obama, that’s what the Jews of Israel do. Because their control over Israel is inherently connected to biblical mandate, Obama must oppose them. He must side instead with a religion of social justice, not a religion of biblical principle.

That means rejecting Jewish Jerusalem. That means rewriting the Bible, that document of sadism and oppression, to make it over into The Book of Obama. That means Israel must pay for the sin of worshiping its God over the god of warmed-over, amoral redistributionism.

Obama’s likely to be disappointed. The Jews have been exiled from Jerusalem several times. Never again.