There’s a thought-game I sometimes play with current events which for lack of a more creative name I’ll simply call “Connect the Dots.” It involves looking at events occurring in the same general timeframe and trying to find the linkages between them. The series of news stories relating to Israel this past fortnight provides a perfect sample to illustrate how it’s played.
Barack Obama just endured what should by any objective measure qualify as a “terrible horrible no good very bad” two weeks with respect to Israel and by extension American Jews. The president who has effectively disabled the option of military strikes to halt the Iranian nuclear bomb regularly talks about how we can achieve the same result through “crippling sanctions ” and similar tough talk. But two weeks ago precisely such crippling sanctions or at least something potentially close to them came up for a vote in the Senate: legislation making it illegal for any American company to patronize any foreign entity that does business with Iran’s central bank. Halting business in this manner would cut off the oil revenues that are Iran’s funding source for its nuclear program. Britain has already banned all transactions with Iran’s central bank and France is also leaning towards doing so.
But the Obama administration forcefully opposed the Senate measure. First it got the bill’s sponsors to include in it a waiver provision that allows the president to simply refuse to enforce it even once passed. Not content with effectively rendering the bill irrelevant Mr. Obama sent officials from both State and Treasury first to plead with the bill’s sponsors to withdraw it and then to the Senate to testify against the bill based on fears of its impact on the economy here and elsewhere. Nevertheless on December 1 the Senate defied Mr. Obama and passed the bill into law by a 100-0 vote which in the current highly partisan atmosphere of Washington is astonishing.
But something seemingly even more astonishing had occurred just 24 hours earlier: At a private Jewish fundraiser where the thirty attendees each contributed between ten and thirty thousand dollars to his reelection campaign the president said this: “Obviously no ally is more important than the state of Israel.…This administration – I try not to pat myself too much on the back – but this administration has done more in terms of the security of the state of Israel than any previous administration.” The question here isn’t how the president can possibly believe what he says but how he can possibly believe that his Jewish audience would believe him given that his administration was attempting to derail sanctions on Iran at that very moment.
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