Obama And The New American Revolution*

Prof. Paul Eidelberg

Much confusion reigns among many Jews, especially in Israel, concerning Senator Barack Obama, should he become America’s next president.

Obama-watchers are worried about is Middle East advisers. Prominent among them is Professor Bzigniev Brzezinski, who was Jimmy Carter’s National Security Adviser. Brzezinski helped orchestrate the fall of America’s ally, the Shah of Iran and the ascendancy of the Ayatollah Khomeini, whose Islamic revolution now threatens Israel and the West.

There is something insidious about Brzezinski—a clue to what underlies Senator Obama’s ascendancy in the Democratic Party. Brzezinski, like George Soros, a billionaire who backed both Obama and Hillary Clinton in the presidential primaries, is a globalist opposed to the sovereignty of the nation state. This attitude conflicts with Judaism, but not with Islam, and sheds light on Brzezinski’s notorious anti-Israel record, a record bordering on Jew-hatred.

That Senator Obama includes among his advisers former U.S. ambassador to Israel Daniel Kurtzer, reputedly an orthodox Jew, is hardly reassuring. Kurtzer not only advocates a Palestinian state with eastern Jerusalem as its capital. He is serving a politician who recently told the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) that he advocates a contiguous Palestinian state, hence one connected with Gaza. This would destroy the geographic continuity of the Jewish state and fatally undermine its security.

Also mentioned among Obama’s advisers is former Secretary of State James Baker, a transparent anti-Semite, who, together with ex-congressman Lee Hamilton, formed the Iraqi Study Group. These political geniuses would have us believe that negotiations can persuade Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to halt Iran’s development of nuclear weapons. As proud Americans, they ignore Ahmadinejad’s stated objective of a world without America—and of course without Israel—hence a world without Christianity and Judaism.

Senator Obama has adopted this see-no-evil, hear-no-evil, and speak-no-evil policy, except that he would qualify the word “negotiations” with the adjective “tough.” He seems to believe that the word “tough” will make him appear as a hard-liner, rather than another muddle-headed Jimmy Carter.

Obama’s Middle East advisers, like Obama himself, lack the intellectual integrity or moral courage to face up to the enormity of evil entrenched in Tehran—an evil rooted in Islam itself, as Dr. Wafa Sultan of Syria and Lebanese-born Brigitte Gabriel have emphasized. You do not negotiate with Muslims committed to your destruction. What is there to negotiate about—the date or manner of your destruction?

In any event, Obama’s choice of advisers must also be understood in terms of domestic politics, and American politics has new levels of significance. Let’s begin on the surface.

Obama defeated Hillary Clinton in the presidential primaries because he outflanked her on the left side of the political spectrum. Of course, he also cultivated a reputation of opposing the war in Iraq, and this multiplied the number of youth that supported his candidacy. Since he was opposed to the war, he had to choose Middle East advisers persons opposed to a preemptive U.S. attack on Iran as the way to stop its development of its nuclear weapons program. But any pundit sees this. Let us therefore examine a second level of the Obama phenomenon.

Everyone knows, by now, that Senator Obama is a glib speaker. It is also becoming increasingly obvious that his slogan of CHANGE is vacuous: he does not articulate a set of basic political principles, nor does he have a well-known record of legislative accomplishments from which one might deduce his basic convictions. Although his voting record in the Senate stamps him a leftist, he strikes many people as an enigmatic phenomenon, which can attract as well as repel.

His 20-year attendance at the church of Jeremiah Wright—an anti-American pastor and unabashed Jew-hater—is suggestive, but his campaign for the presidency has compelled him to equivocate about his guru and then reject him. Obama is nothing if not an ambitious politician whose first priority is to be elected. Nothing new here; but that he should have so long admired an anti-American pastor leads me to the heart of the matter, and this goes beyond Obama.

Pundits fail to explore the significance of a very simple fact: a vote for Obama is also a vote for the Democratic Party. Unless one understands the revolutionary change that has taken place in the Democratic Party, one will not understand the Obama phenomenon. That revolution involves both domestic and foreign policy.

Of course, domestic politics will be Obama’s primary concern if he wants a second term in the White House. Even if he should ignore the soft approach of his Middle East advisers on Iran, a hard policy would be trumped by his need to win congressional support for his domestic program, and that means the program of the Democratic Party.

The Democratic Party has long been committed to Big Government, hence big bureaucracy, welfare state subsidies, high taxation, weakened private sector and diminished entrepreneurial energy.

But today’s Democratic Party is also committed to multiculturalism. Multiculturalism requires America’s retreat from national sovereignty on the one hand, and from superpower status in world affairs on the other. This agrees with Obama’s trite presidential campaign slogan, CHANGE. Now let us illustrate the political revolution that has taken place in America by means of a very new Democratic Party headed by Barack Obama.

It will be sufficient for this purpose to examine how the House of Representatives voted on a bill concerning Islamic Jihad, a bill that conveys the ideological nature of the conflict between America and Islamic terrorism.

On May 8, 2008, Republican Congressman Peter Hoekstra of Michigan attempted to add an amendment on the “terror lexicon” of a House committee bill on intelligence funding (House Resolution 5959).

Hoekstra’s amendment condemned efforts by the State Department, the National Counter Terrorism Center, and the Department of Homeland Security to recommend a “terror lexicon” that prohibits use of words such as “Jihad,” “jihadist,” “Islamist,” “mujahadeen,” “caliphate,” etc.
On July 16, 2008, the bill was presented to the full House of Representatives for debate and adoption, including Congressman Hoekstra’s amendment. The amendment stated that: “None of the funds authorized to be appropriated by this Act may be used to prohibit or discourage the use of the words or phrases ‘jihadist’, ‘jihad’, ‘Islamo-fascism’, ‘caliphate’, ‘Islamist’, or ‘Islamic terrorist’ by or within the intelligence community or the Federal Government.”

The amendment passed by the margin of 249-180 (with 10 abstentions). All of the 180 Representatives that voted against Hoekstra’s amendment are Democrats!

This suggests that these Democrats have been tainted by moral or cultural relativism. Relativism not only undermines a strong sense of national pride and identity; it also conduces to a soft and non–judgmental attitude toward acts of Islamic terrorism. Moral relativism saps moral outrage and dulls memory even of the monstrous deeds perpetrated by Muslim terrorists: the beheading of American journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan; the suicide bombing of Jewish school buses in Jerusalem. Even 9/11 is going down the memory tube, judging from the votes of 180 Democrats.

Relativism corrupts the mind, eviscerates patriotism. For the first time in American history, the Democratic Party vilified America’s Commander-in-Chief while the country was at war. Democrats were thus giving aid and comfort to the enemy, were thus prima facie guilty of treason.

Radical leftwing Democrats will ride on the coattails of Senator Obama in the November 2008 elections. In addition to their powerful influence on domestic policy, they will persist in a policy of appeasement of Islam, a policy that endangers Israel’s existence. Moreover, since Obama has said he will pull American troops out of Iraq within 16 months—an invitation for Iran to move in—I fear that the next Congress, if controlled by the Democrats, will legislate America’s defeat in Iraq and its virtual surrender to Islam.

What also needs to be emphasized, however, is that an insidious political revolution is taking place in America, a revolution pursued under Obama’s seemingly innocuous slogan of CHANGE. That change may well be nothing less than regime change—a change that will eventually terminate American civilization. I say this with two developments in mind: the economic ascendancy of a nuclear-armed China and the resurgence of Russian imperialism, undermining the U.S. by supplying Iran with S-300 long-range anti-aircraft missiles to thwart any attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities.

And so, awing presidency may undo the American Revolution of 1776. At stake is the Judeo-Christian heritage underlying that magnificent Revolution.
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*Edited transcript of the Eidelberg Report, Israel Nation Radio, July 28, 2008.