For a man who has never been shy about sharing his sanctimonious opinions, former President Barack Obama has been noticeably quiet about anti-Israel anarchists’ takeover of U.S. college campuses.
On Monday, Columbia University — Obama’s alma mater — announced it will not host its university-wide commencement ceremony for this year’s graduating class. That appears to be a response to the pro-Hamas demonstrations that have engulfed the school for weeks. The announcement came days after the university (finally) permitted law enforcement to arrest participants unlawfully occupying a school building.
One would imagine the erection of illegal encampments and harassment of Jewish students at Columbia and other American universities would prompt outcry from any former president. Donald Trump, for example, has repeatedly condemned these demonstrators and their anti-Israeli sentiments. But for Obama, the task is seemingly too difficult.
Since the launch of the Columbia encampments last month, Obama has issued a smattering of posts on X, none of which address leftists’ takeover of campuses throughout the country. While the former president wished Jews a happy Passover on April 22, he couldn’t be bothered to condemn the antisemitic behavior on display at his alma mater or any of America’s post-secondary institutions.
Obama’s Checkered Past
It goes without saying that if the aforementioned demonstrators were “MAGA Republicans” protesting an Islamic country and harassing Muslim students, legacy media “journalists” would be relentlessly spamming the phone lines and emails of every GOP official in the country asking for condemnation. They will never hold Democrats to the same standard, and their refusal to call out Obama for ignoring the leftist occupation of universities shows it.
While the media’s inaction isn’t surprising, neither is Obama’s silence. Obama’s decision to remain mum on the issue is representative of his behavior and the individuals encompassing him throughout his life.
Allegations of Obama indulging antisemitism have existed long before he became president. Last year, for example, Tablet Magazine’s David Samuels published a lengthy expose based on a question-and-answer interview with David Garrow, a longtime civil rights historian who authored a biography on Obama in 2017 titled Rising Star.
In his book, Garrow documented an argument between Obama and his longtime Chicago girlfriend, Sheila Miyoshi Jager. It allegedly started because the future president refused to condemn antisemitism and black nationalism.
The dispute occurred after the two reportedly visited “an exhibit at Chicago’s Spertus Institute about the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann,” a Nazi who played a major role in organizing the Holocaust. It was during this time, according to Samuels, that Chicago politics was engulfed in controversy after Steve Cokely, a black mayoral aide, “accused Jewish doctors in Chicago of infecting Black babies with AIDS as part of a genocidal plot against African Americans.”
“In Jager’s recollection, what set off the quarrel that precipitated the end of the couple’s relationship was Obama’s stubborn refusal, after seeing the exhibit, and in the swirl of this Cokely affair, to condemn Black racism,” Samuels wrote. “While acknowledging that Obama’s embrace of a Black identity had created some degree of distance between the couple, she insisted that what upset her that day was Obama’s inability to condemn Cokely’s comments.”
“It was not Obama’s Blackness that bothered her, but that he would not condemn antisemitism,” Samuels added.
Even if one were to dismiss Jager’s allegations and accept Obama’s version of the argument, it still doesn’t explain the prominent antisemitic figures the Illinois Democrat surrounded himself with before his presidency.
In 2018, a photo surfaced showing Obama and well-known antisemite Louis Farrakhan smiling together during a 2005 Congressional Black Caucus meeting. Farrakhan — who heads Nation of Islam, a black supremacist group — has claimed that Judaism is a “gutter religion,” whites are a “race of devils,” and Adolf Hitler “was a very great man.”
According to National Review, Farrakhan endorsed Obama during the 2008 Democrat presidential primary and later claimed he met with Obama before he launched his campaign. Conveniently, the picture was suppressed until after Obama’s two terms.
Obama’s associations with antisemites goes back further, to his days as a community organizer in Chicago. The former president was a known associate of Jeremiah Wright, a “reverend” of Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ who has issued numerous racist and vile remarks through the years. Wright is also Obama’s former pastor. Wright married the Obamas and baptized their children.
One of Wright’s most egregious statements came less than a week after the al Qaeda terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. The “pastor” claimed America brought such atrocities on itself because of its foreign policy.
“We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye,” Wright said. “We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards. America’s chickens are coming home to roost.”
Obama brushed aside his affiliation with Wright during his 2008 campaign, saying, “I don’t think my church is actually particularly controversial.” He also dismissed Wright’s unhinged remarks, saying Wright is “an old uncle who says things I don’t always agree with.” Wright claimed “them Jews” were keeping him from seeing Obama during his time as president.
His history with Farrakhan and Wright doesn’t even include Obama’s rabid anti-Israel foreign policy as president or more recent indulgence of “both sides-ism” regarding Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel.
Obama’s Legacy Comes to Fruition
Contrast Obama’s embrace of antisemites like Wright and Farrakhan with the modern Democrat Party’s response to the pro-Hamas anarchy infecting America’s campuses.
While some Democrats have condemned the antisemitism spewed by these demonstrators, others, such as Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar, have gone to great lengths to defend the encampments and coddle their participants. Omar — whose daughter was suspended by Columbia for her role in the anti-Israel demonstrations on campus — has repeatedly accused Israel of committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza and issued numerous antisemitic statements.
Many of these left-wing colleges have treated these demonstrators with kid gloves, waiting weeks before allowing law enforcement to break up the unlawful encampments. At the University of North Carolina, some professors are so committed to the leftist cause that they’re withholding “grades from students until the school reinstate[s] individuals suspended for pro-Palestinian demonstrations on campus,” according to a report by The Federalist’s Tristan Justice.
What media “analysts” will never acknowledge, however, is that unhinged anti-Israel and antisemitic figures like these were mainstreamed in the Democrat Party by Obama.
Obama’s embrace and tolerance of antisemites and corporate media’s refusal to hold him accountable for it is responsible for the anti-Israel radicalism rampant throughout the modern left. By giving Obama a pass for his controversial behavior and prior associations with people like Wright and Farrakhan, Democrats — willingly or unwillingly — deemed it OK for anti-American radicals who harbor the worst sentiments about Jews to join the party’s ranks.
Coupled with Obama’s pro-Iran foreign policy, this also altered Democrats’ views on Israel. Having previously viewed U.S. support for Israel to be a positive development, today the Democrat Party now opposes Israel’s right to defend itself from Hamas and Iranian-backed attackers to appease their antisemitic wing.
Whether he believes it or not, Obama’s silence on the pro-Hamas movement infecting America’s campuses speaks volumes.
Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood
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