Netanyahu’s Moment

Loading

William Kristol:

Sometimes a speech is just a speech. Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech about Iran policy on March 3 will not be his first address to Congress. It will make familiar, if important, arguments. One might assume that, like the vast majority of speeches, it would soon be overtaken by events in Israel and the United States and the world.

But the Obama administration’s reaction to the Israeli prime minister’s appearance suggests Netanyahu’s is more than just another speech. An administration that disdains the use of disproportionate force has been, to say the least, disproportionately forceful in its efforts to undermine Netanyahu’s message and discredit the messenger. What is Obama so worried about? What is he, if we may put it indelicately, so scared of?

We can get a clue from the almost equally disproportionate reaction of Obama’s surrogates to Rudy Giuliani’s suggestion that Barack Obama doesn’t love his country. Why, really, should anyone care about Giuliani’s comment? We have no crime of lèse majesté in this country. But Obama defenders did care. Did they suspect Giuliani had struck a nerve?

It seems he did. After days in which the entire media and most politicians, including many Republicans, hurried to condemn Giuliani and to assure everyone that Barack Obama loves our country as much as the next red-blooded American, a new poll from YouGov reports only 47 percent of respondents saying they think the president loves America, with a slight majority either thinking he does not (35 percent) or being unsure (17 percent). By contrast, 58 percent think Rudy Giuliani loves America, and only 10 percent think not. As for themselves, 85 percent of respondents say they love America, and only 6 percent say they do not.

What does this have to do with Netanyahu? Agree with his policies or not, no one doubts he loves his country. In fact, he seems to like America a lot, too. One suspects that if asked, respondents to the YouGov poll might have judged Netanyahu more of an America-lover than Barack Obama. And they would in a sense have been right.

After all, Obama is not just a citizen of America. He’s a citizen of the world. And he’s a disbeliever in American exceptionalism in any sense stronger than the British believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks in Greek exceptionalism. There’s nothing surprising about this. Obama is very much in the mainstream of modern progressive thought in his embrace of cosmopolitanism and his distrust of nationalism. He’s not interested in riding a high horse equipped, as he would see it, with patriotic blinders or nationalist spurs.

Netanyahu, by contrast, is a patriot and a nationalist. He’s an Israeli patriot and nationalist. But he also appreciates the historic role and accomplishments of the great nation-states of the West. History—the history of the Jewish people, but not only the Jewish people—is always on his mind. He is inspired by the example of Ze’ev Jabotinsky—and also of Winston Churchill. He appreciates the legacy of David Ben-Gurion—and also of Harry Truman.

Read more

0 0 votes
Article Rating
Subscribe
Notify of
1 Comment
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments

Obama’s reaction reads as an over reaction to an ally’s speech. Valerie Jarrett must want this Iranian deal very badly. Could this be the sweetheart deal Iran was counting on from it’s highly placed lobbyist daughter?

“A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear. The traitor is the plague.” – Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 B.C.)