As Columbia University’s most prominent alum, former president Barack Obama would seem to have a moral obligation to speak about what is arguably the most visible outbreak of antisemitism on American soil in his lifetime.
I refer here to the occupation of Obama’s alma mater by Hamas-supporters who have been openly threatening Jewish students, chanting “Kill all Zionists,” and shouting racial slurs like “pig.”
As I sat down to write this, five days into the protest, Obama had said not a word.
By contrast, Obama was tweeting about the August 2017 Antifa/white nationalist brouhaha in Charlottesville, Virginia before the day was through.
“No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin or his background or his religion,” Obama tweeted in the evening of August 12. “People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.”
At the time, this was the most “liked” tweet in Twitter (now X) history.
In the last five days, Obama tweeted about Earth Day twice, about a book on healthy lifestyles, and about the death of Florida politico Bob Graham. But not a word about Columbia, at least not until I started writing.
“One minute ago” — is the NSA that good? — Obama weighed in with a photo of himself and Michelle at a traditional seder meal from days gone by. In this tweet, marking the beginning of Passover, there is no talk of hate, no mention of Hamas, no reference to Columbia.
“And in a time when there’s been so much suffering and loss in Israel and Gaza,” he writes in his fortune cookie prose, “let’s reaffirm our commitment to the Jewish people, and people of all religions, who deserve to feel safe and secure wherever they live and practice their faith.”
That should rein in the little darlings at Columbia, no?
No, not at all.
Like all respectable Democrats, Obama is conflicted about the Hamas protests, only more so. As a fellow traveler in the world of Islam, Obama has had to work hard to keep his roots from showing. He has barely succeeded. In a lengthy statement in October, Obama made a few perfunctory remarks about the “unspeakable brutality” perpetrated by Hamas on October 7, but he reserved very nearly all his finger-wagging for Israel.
He called on Jews to acknowledge that many Palestinians “were not only displaced when Israel was formed but continue to be forcibly displaced by a settler movement that too often has received tacit or explicit support from the Israeli government.” He made the dubious claim as well that “Palestinian leaders who’ve been willing to make concessions for a two-state solution have too often had little to show for their efforts.” In short, he scolded Israelis for wanting to defend themselves against people who like to brag on video about their “unspeakable brutality.”
From the beginning, the media have allowed Obama to conceal his easy tolerance of antisemitism. One journalist who came to Obama’s aid, unapologetically at that, was photographer and occasional National Public Radio (NPR) commentator Askia Muhammad.
In January 2018, as a way of promoting his new book, Muhammad shared with the world a photo he had taken in 2005 at a Black Congressional Caucus event. In the center of the photo is a smiling Barack Obama. Standing right next to him, also smiling broadly, is Nation of Islam honcho Louis Farrakhan. Sensing what might generously be called “bad optics,” a Black Caucus member stopped Muhammad even before he left the building.
“I gave the picture up at the time and basically swore secrecy,” Muhammad admitted thirteen years later. “But after the nomination was secured and all the way up until the inauguration; then for eight years after he was president, it was kept under cover.”
When asked whether he thought the photo, if revealed, would have made a difference in the 2008 campaign, Muhammad said, emphatically, “It absolutely would have made a difference.”
The Los Angeles Times violated just about all journalistic canons to bail Obama out in 2008 when it mattered most. In April of that year, the Times secured a copy of a video recorded at a dinner held in Chicago in 2003 on behalf of Obama’s close friend, Rashid Khalidi. As liberal David Garrow points out in his Obama biography, Rising Star, the Obamas, the Khalidis, Bill Ayers, and his wife Bernardine Dohrn dined together almost weekly before Obama felt the need — with the media’s able assistance — to bury those relationships.
The occasion was Khalidi’s imminent departure from Chicago for Columbia University in New York. In 2008, his friendship with Obama posed obvious problems for the candidate. Khalidi would deny he was a spokesman for the lethal Palestinian Liberation Organization, but he was close enough to the PLO to give the rumors merit.
In his account of the dinner, Peter Wallsten of the Times reported a few of the provocative toasts offered to the departing Khalidi. One of the dinner guests compared “Zionist settlers on the West Bank” to Osama bin Laden. Another guest recited a poem accusing Israel of terrorism. For his part, Obama was quoted as thanking Khalidi for offering “consistent reminders to me of my own blind spots and my own biases.”
What Weather Underground alums Ayers and Dohrn might have said in Obama’s presence was not reported. The Times absolutely refused to air the videotape it had in its possession or let any other party see it. Obama’s reaction to the group’s virulent obsession with Jews and Israel was lost for the ages.
As to Khalidi, last week, an undercover reporter caught him saying what the media would rather he did not. The reporter was posing as a student appalled by the campus’s “Zionistic culture,” a comment that Khalidi affirmed. Apparently, even Columbia’s tepid response to widespread Jew-baiting troubled him.
“We have an antisemitism task force because everybody on the other side has howled their head off if somebody has so much as looked sideways at them,” said the delusional Khalidi. He called the task force “yet another blow” against his allies on campus. “I mean, they picked bigots, fanatics, right-wingers, and extremists,” he said. “I mean, it’s a scandal, and you can’t say anything.”
In the real world, Khalidi can say just about anything he likes with impunity. Until November, at least, Obama has got to be more careful.
To learn more, read Jack Cashill’s Unmasking Obama: The Fight to Tell the True Story of a Failed Presidency.
Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.
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