Former Israeli envoy under fire for essay on Obama's Muslim roots

Michael Oren is feeling the heat for an essay he published in Foreign Policy Friday professing to understand President Barack Obama’s attitude towards Islam.

In an approximately 2,000-word article entitled “ How Obama Opened His Heart to the Muslim World,” the former Israeli ambassador to the U.S. wrote that in his former position he spent a significant amount of time trying to understand Obama’s worldview.


“Obama’s attitudes toward Islam clearly stem from his personal interactions with Muslims. These were described in depth in his candid memoir, ‘Dreams from My Father,’” wrote Oren. “Obama wrote passionately of the Kenyan villages where, after many years of dislocation, he felt most at home and of his childhood experiences in Indonesia.”

“I could imagine how a child raised by a Christian mother might see himself as a natural bridge between her two Muslim husbands. I could also speculate how that child’s abandonment by those men could lead him, many years later, to seek acceptance by their co-religionists.”

The Anti-Defamation League, an international NGO dedicated to fighting anti-Semitism, called Oren’s article “unjustified and insensitive.” The group’s director, Abraham Foxman, said in a statement that Oren should retract his comments about Obama, which he said “veer into the realm of conspiracy theories.”

Multiple Israeli officials also condemned Oren’s essay. Former Finance Minister and leader of the centrist Yesh Atid party Yair Lapid told an Israeli news source that Oren’s piece was “pseudo-psychological analysis based on nothing” and Deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovely told Walla! News that his article “does not represent Israeli policy.”

Oren is now a sitting member of the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, and some of the blowback is coming from his party’s political rivals.

But the Foreign Policy essay was only the latest in a series of controversial articles from Oren, who has been promoting his book “Ally: My Journey Across the American-Israeli Divide,” set for publication Tuesday, with op-eds in various U.S. publications.

Last week, Oren wrote two opinion articles: One in the Wall Street Journal and one in the Los Angeles Times, both of which charged that Obama had abandoned Israel and vigorously criticized his nuclear negotiations with Iran.

The Wall Street Journal met with a sharp response not only from the Obama administration — whose ambassador to Israel said on Israeli radio that “what he wrote does not reflect the truth” — but also from Oren’s own Kulanu party in Israel. Moshe Kahlon, the head of Kulanu and Israel’s current minister of finance, distanced himself from Oren and said his views do not reflect that of the party.

Oren, a former historian who was born in the U.S., served as Israel’s ambassador to the United States from 2009 to 2013. He was first elected to the Israeli Knesset earlier this year and currently serves in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s governing coalition.

Netanyahu has reportedly declined to condemn Oren’s writings.