Lee Smith’s “The Choice: Trump or Obama” is the column of the week and this is the quote of the day:
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Washington policymakers favor Israel because of its strategic value. Since the start of the U.S.-Israel alliance in the mid-’70s, the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence services have come to rely on Israeli intelligence, especially human intelligence, technology, and innovation, as well as Israel’s large and accomplished military capable of mobilizing massive amounts of troops in 24 hours in a volatile region of great importance to U.S. interests.
Trump’s voters love Israel because, primarily, it’s a winner—and also because of the cultural affinity between our two nations. Yes, Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East, it’s proudly nationalistic, and many evangelicals believe it’s their duty as Christians to stand watch after the slaughter of 6 million Jews in the last century.
But that just scratches the surface. Israel is part of our historical roots. The men and women who founded and built this country modeled themselves after the Hebrew prophets, named their children after Old Testament figures, and named their settlements, villages, and towns after Old Testament places. In his famous 1630 sermon about building a city upon a hill, Massachusetts Bay Gov. John Winthrop invoked the Lord’s faithful servant, Moses, and promised that “we shall find that the God of Israel is among us, when 10 of us shall be able to resist a thousand of our enemies.” American religious figures have used the pattern of the Hebrew Bible repeatedly throughout our history to explain their cause and mission, such as [Joseph] Smith, who compared himself to Moses, an analogy that might have steeled the Mormons’ faith during their 1,300-mile walk through the American wilderness. In short, current-day Israel is vital to American peace and prosperity, while historical, biblical Israel is part of our DNA.
AIPAC’s power resides in the awe and admiration Americans have for Israel, yesterday and today. If AIPAC were all-powerful, like [Marjorie Taylor] Greene and [Matt] Gaetz and others profess to believe, it would’ve been able to stop the Iran deal. Instead, Obama overran AIPAC, as well as Congress and the American public, which opposed legalizing Iran’s bomb by a large margin. The Iran deal was vital to Obama because it was the instrument with which he’d transform the United States: To unmake our history and revise our origins, he sought to replace Israel with the negation of Israel, or those whose ultimate aim is to destroy it: Iran and its proxies, especially the Palestinians.
In the interim, Obama’s Iran deal restructured the Democratic Party. Inverting U.S. foreign policy by replacing Israel with the regime that embodies exterminationist antisemitism was also a domestic stratagem to break Jewish power in the Democratic Party. It’s helpful to understand the post-Oct. 7 pro-Hamas protests in that light.
While many lifelong Jewish Democrats were shocked that the demonstrations were so openly antisemitic, calling for genocide of the Jews, this was precisely the point of Obama’s design: Negating Israel and prioritizing anti-Israel activists in the party’s hierarchy could lead only to the Democrats sanctioning anti-Israel activists who celebrated the murder of thousands of Israelis. That is, the protests that honored the Palestinians’ campaign of rape, torture, and murder—remember, the rallies started even before Israel launched reprisals—showed how wildly Obama’s policy had succeeded.
Then, a year after pro-Hamas demonstrators destabilized U.S. cities and campuses with increasingly violent attacks against Jews, the Joe Biden administration announced the “first-ever U.S. National Strategy to Counter Islamophobia and Anti-Arab Hate.” It was evidence that the Democrats had simply replaced the Jews with those who hunt Jews.
When wealthy Jews like Bill Ackman left the party in disgust, that was also part of Obama’s plan. The Jews didn’t have to exit the party; indeed, they could keep contributing money, but they’d have to give up their front-row seats. What happened after Ackman pledged to support Trump was much harder to anticipate. Who knew the Obama faction would have a partner on the right scaring Jews away from MAGA? And yet, two months before election day, Tucker Carlson hosted on his podcast a revisionist historian of National Socialism—according to Carlson, America’s most important historian. Hitler, on this view, wasn’t the bad guy. No, that was Winston Churchill.
It could hardly be lost on Trump supporters that the legendary wartime prime minister was a hero to Trump, who restored his bust to the Oval Office after Obama had removed it. Here was the leading MAGA influencer, who’d spoken at the Republican National Convention days after the candidate was shot in the face, undermining not just Trump’s philosemitism and pro-Israel record but also his self-image and demonstrating to Jewish voters that America First is what its most rabidly ideological opponents had claimed: a Pat Buchanan reboot, even including the rehabilitation of Nazis….
Read the whole thing here.
