Would a President Obama be sufficiently pro-Israel?  What a riduculous question.  

Obama is a Democrat.  On the national level, the Democrats are more in thrall to AIPAC than was the Communist Party USA in thrall to the late Soviet Union during the heydays of stalin.   It's simple deductive logic.

Obama worships at a church whose pastor is chums with Farrakhan?  Watch Obama quickly convert to atheism.

Obama counts the noted Polish-American anti-semite Zbigniew Brzezinski as a foreign policy advisor?  Well, there are advisers and there are advisers.  ZB, one of the frostiests of all cold warriors, seems a very odd fit overall with Obama.  And just because one receives advice, one is not obligated to accept it.  No, I fully expect ZB, a billionth of a nanosceond after the first time his services to Obama are referenced critically, to be jettisoned more quickly than roten, reeking, decaying, maggot-infested month-old kielbase.

Anyway, the link is below so you can examine the wool-gathering for yourself:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/11/opinion/l11cohen.html?th&emc=th


Sorry, the link is NOT below, as it's not available.  I've copied Roger Cohen's column below.



No Manchurian Candidate

Published: February 11, 2008

I believe Barack Obama is a strong but not uncritical supporter of Israel. That is what the Middle East needs from an American leader: the balance implicit in a two-state solution.

Roger Cohen

Yet it’s a tough position for Obama to hold in this presidential campaign because his Jewish credentials are under scrutiny.

On January 22, with Gaza sealed and the suffering of Palestinians prompting calls for a U.N. Security Council statement deploring their plight, Obama penned a strongly-worded letter of support for Israel.

“The Security Council should clearly and unequivocally condemn the rocket attacks against Israel, and should make clear that Israel has a right to defend itself against such actions,” Obama wrote to Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Otherwise, he declared, it should not speak at all.

The Security Council remained silent; Obama’s still uncertain standing with Jews in the United States and Israel was strengthened. But rumors, many scurrilous, still swirl. Most have questioned the degree of his commitment to Israel.

“The biggest problem is a lack of familiarity, an exotic name and malicious assaults,” David Axelrod, who is Obama’s chief strategist, told me. “There’s no ambiguity in his position on the Middle East.”

The attacks, mainly anonymous e-mails, have woven together various threads — his middle name “Hussein;” schooling in Muslim Indonesia; his Chicago pastor’s embrace of the anti-Semitic leader of the Nation of Islam, Louis Farrakhan; and his calls for dialogue with Iran — to portray Obama as the Muslim Manchurian candidate.

Leading American Jewish organizations have denounced these “hateful e-mails.” Obama has condemned Farrakhan’s anti-Semitism and made clear he disagrees with his pastor, the Rev. Jerermiah A. Wright Jr., whose magazine honored Farrakhan last year. But he’s not broken with Wright, the man who ushered him to his Christian faith.

Some doubts clearly persist among U.S. Jews, who account for just 2 percent of the population but a higher percentage of voters, and one with wide influence. On a recent four-day trip to Florida, David Harris, the executive director of the nonpartisan American Jewish Committee, encountered the following questions:

Did Obama really attend a madrassa? What are his relations with Wright? Why does he have former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski (viewed as cool toward Israel) on his foreign policy team?

“You could sum the concerns up as ‘does Obama feel Israel in his kishkas?’” Harris told me, using the Yiddish word for guts. “And does he have the steel and spine for the tough moments or believe diplomacy is the be-all and end-all of international relations?”

Such worries have surfaced in Israel, where Danny Ayalon, a former ambassador to the United States, has described Obama’s candidacy as cause for “concern.”

Still, many American Jews, particularly younger ones, are gravitating to Obama. Hillary Clinton, whose pro-Israel credentials are watertight, took close to two-thirds of the Jewish vote in the New Jersey and New York primaries. But in California the Jewish vote was almost equally divided, and in Connecticut and Massachusetts Obama got more Jewish votes.

“There’s a generational transition,” said Douglas Bloomfield, a former legislative director of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. “The baby boomers are now the older generation and Clinton is their candidate. Younger Jews are more pro-Obama. A majority of Jews want a two-state peace, but are intimidated by a vocal right wing.”

Obama should resist such intimidation. I understand the immediate political calculus that makes a forthright statement of his pro-Israel sentiments critical. That is why, in a speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee last year, he did not even mention Jewish settlements.

That’s also why when Obama made an accurate statement in Iowa last year to the effect that “Nobody’s suffering more than the Palestinian people,” he later massaged the phrase to suggest the suffering was self-inflicted. And that’s why his letter to Khalilzad was so emphatic in its pro-Israel tone.

That’s O.K.. Obama has to play hardball now. John McCain, the presumptive Republican candidate, also sent a letter — the day after Obama’s — calling for the U.N. to condemn “the terrorist tactics employed by Hamas.”

Foreign policy will roar back once this is a straight Republican-Democrat fight. A Democrat who’s going to win has be strong on core American defense principles, which include Israel’s security.

Obama feels Israel in his kishkas, all right. Equally, he feels dialogue, which has been his way of getting things done since he became a Chicago community organizer in the 1980s. There would be no six-year time-outs on Israel-Palestine under an Obama presidency. “He’d be actively involved from day one,” said Axelrod.

Jews should get over the scaremongering: Obama is no Manchurian. Nor is he blind to the fact that backing Israel is not enough if such U.S. backing provides carte blanche for the subjugation of another people.



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