With the election only a mere few weeks away, Obama is looking to depend on a key voting bloc to help keep him in office. However, many of them may not be there to support him in the ballot box because they have serious concerns about his commentment to Israel. They have legitimate reasons to be nervous about allowing Obama to have a second term. These three videos below will explain why:
Another example of Jewish concern about Obama's commitment to Israel is found in this billboard that was put up recently:
On the other side of the world in the Middle East, Israelis are also concerned about Obama's commitment to their country. Jonathan Spyer, who is a Jewish research fellow at the Global Research in International Affairs Center, journalist, soldier and author of his first book, The Transforming Fire: The Rise of the Israel-Islamist Conflict, offers his opinion of how confident the citizens of Isreal feel about President Obama's promise that he won't allow Iran to acquire nukes. Here's what he had to say which I think also similarly reflects how many Jews here in America feel about Obama:
MJT: Obama repeatedly says he will not allow Iran to acquire nuclear weapons. Do you believe him? How many Israelis believe him? He’s letting Assad get away with murder, but he did go after Qaddafi and bin Laden.
Jonathan Spyer: I don’t want to interfere in the internal American discussion, but your question is nicely phrased so I can comment without doing that. Confidence in President Obama is very low in Israel. That is because his performance so far seems to suggest that he has little understanding of the Hobbesian world of Middle Eastern politics and the aspects required in order to build firm alliances and proxies here. From his Cairo speech and the abandonment of Mubarak to the vacillating and paralysis on Syria, he just seems to be singing from a different and wholly unsuitable songbook. So I think very few Israelis have confidence that he will act effectively to prevent a nuclear Iran. No coherent red lines, including an outlining of the consequences of crossing them, means the Iranians will keep on moving ahead. Obama wants out of the Middle East, as he himself has made clear. He’ll do counter-terrorism from the air against small, extreme jihadi groups. In Libya, I think it was the Europeans and specifically the French who got that rolling, with the US following on, though of course inevitably doing most of the heavy lifting in the end. And frankly I think many Israelis also have the feeling, which we haven’t had for quite a few years, that the man in the White House right now isn’t a deep friend of our country, that he doesn’t understand or isn’t really interested in the story of Israel and the Jewish People, and consequently lacks a grasp of the deeper moorings which I think should underlie, and have in recent years underlain, the alliance between the US and Israel.
MJT: What is it specifically that President Obama does not understand? Surely he knows the Middle East is a much rougher neighborhood than Europe and North America. What else does he still need to grasp besides the obvious? What would you explain to him if you had his ear for a couple of minutes?
Jonathan Spyer: I would try to explain to him the dynamic of patron-client relationships in our neighborhood. I would explain to him that your clients don’t need to love you, don’t want you to bow to them, and don’t even really need to know that you respect them and empathize with them (though they will need you to at least go through the motions in this regard.) What they need to know is that if they get into trouble (and they will) you will back them and help them to your utmost. If they think you won’t or can’t do that, they won’t want to be your client. They will prefer to be the client of another patron (probably your enemy or rival) who will be willing to do this. As a result, the value of your strategic coin will rapidly decline. Right now, the net result of Obama’s losing Egypt/Tunisia/Yemen, and Iran/Russia/China’s non-losing of Syria, is that US credibility as a patron is low. Obama seems mainly dangerous to his friends, less so to his enemies, the killing of Bin-Laden notwithstanding. This is making allies nervous and enemies happy. This is not good. In particular, the most vulnerable allies (the Gulf monarchies) are very nervous indeed, and are seeking to organize themselves independently because of their impression that the US right now is not there. The trouble is that these countries are too weak for the job. As we see now in Syria, for example, they can’t deliver against Assad. So the end result of Obama’s conceptual error is that the Iran-led alliance, which remains by far the most potent and dangerous enemy in the region, is holding up well, while what used to look like a US-led regional alliance no longer really exists. This, in my view, derives directly from the American President’s failure to grasp the basic rules for behavior as a patron in the Hobbesian space of the Middle East. So if I had a few minutes that’s what I’d tell him. But I’d tell him this without a great deal of enthusiasm, because I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t get it.
Obama has had a long histoy of being flaky on Israel to the point that even life long liberal Jews are wondering about how committed Obama really is to Israel. While Obama enjoyed support from Jews in 2008, he will not get that same level of support or votes in 2012. If enough Jews abandon him at the polls on November 6th, he will not be reelected as President.
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