Accusing Obama of anti-Semitism enables AIPAC to wield power but escape scrutiny

Saying that the lobby spends money to convince members of Congress to do things they would otherwise not do is not anti-Semitic: it’s the truth.

By Peter Beinart | Aug. 19, 2015

U.S. President Barack Obama has really done it this time. To sell his Iran deal, “he’s hinting broadly at anti-Semitic conceits.” He’s “using terms that are often code words for Jews.” And his minions are using “anti-Jewish incitement as a political tool.” 

How could the vast majority of American Jews have voted, twice, for a man so eager to demonize them? And how could Obama’s Jewish deputy secretary of state, his Jewish deputy national security advisor, his Jewish ambassador to Israel, his Jewish director of the Office of Foreign Assets Control (which oversees Iran sanctions) and his Orthodox Jewish Treasury secretary — all of whom are playing key roles in promoting the Iran agreement — be part of this rhetorical pogrom? Jewish self-hatred, it seems, is a mysterious and powerful thing.

The claim that Obama is peddling anti-Semitism boils down to this: He is saying things about the people and organizations who oppose the Iran deal that, in the past, anti-Semites have said about Jews. Those things fall into three categories: war, money and dual loyalty.

Let’s start with the first: war. In his speech earlier this month at American University, Obama warned that “Congressional rejection of this deal leaves any U.S. administration that is absolutely committed to preventing Iran from getting a nuclear weapon with one option, another war in the Middle East.” The reason is that without a deal, Iran’s “breakout time [to a nuclear weapon], which is already fairly small, could shrink to near zero.” Once that occurred, Obama asked rhetorically, “Does anyone really doubt that the same voices now raised against this deal will be demanding that whoever is president bomb those nuclear facilities?” 

See the Jew-hatred? Obama, wrote former Bush administration official Elliot Abrams in The Weekly Standard, “is here feeding a deep line of anti-Semitism that accuses American Jews of getting America into wars. Of course this goes back the World War II and the accusations against Franklin Roosevelt, whose anti-Semitic critics called him ‘Rosenfeld.’”

It’s hard to know where to begin. For starters, Obama never said anything about Jews, or Jewish organizations, in his American University speech. He referred to “voices now raised against this deal,” some of whom are Jewish and most of whom are not. So if Obama slandered anyone with his claim that deal opponents are putting the United States on a path to war, it wasn’t Jews. It was hawks. As it happens, quite a few prominent hawks have, explicitly, called for war. (For instance, William Kristol, editor of the magazine where Abrams published his article.)http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.671930