Since former President Jimmy Carter is scheduled to speak at the Democratic National Convention, permit me to republish the following artcle.

Obama, Israel, and a New American Revolution

Prof. Paul Eidelberg

Much confusion reigns among many Jews, especially in Israel, concerning Senator Barack Obama, should he become the next president of the United States.

Obama-watchers are worried about his 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 more insidious about Brzezinski, which may be a clue to what underlies Obama’s ascendancy in the Democratic Party. Brzezinski, like billionaire George Soros, who backed Obama as well as Hillary Clinton, is an internationalist who has long opposed the sovereignty of the nation state. This attitude conflicts with Judaism, but not with Islam, which sheds light on Brzezinski’s notorious anti-Israel record, which borders 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 advocates a Palestinian state with eastern Jerusalem as its capital.

Also mentioned among Obama’s advisers is Lee Hamilton who, with James Baker, a transparent anti-Semite, advocates negotiations with Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to halt the completion of Iran’s nuclear weapons program. This is the policy adopted by Senator Obama, who would have us believe that by using the adjective “tough” to “negotiations” makes him a hard-liner, rather than another muddle-headed Jimmy Carter, whose anti-Israel or pro-Arab posture is blatant.

Obama’s Middle East advisers, like Obama himself, lack the intellectual and moral courage to recognize the enormity of evil confronting Israel—an evil rooted in Islam itself. One does not negotiate with those committed to your destruction. What is there to negotiate about—the date or mode 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 us begin on the surface.

Obama defeated Senator 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 nuclear weapons. But and pundit knows 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, and he does not have a well-known record of legislative accomplishments from which one might deduce such principles. He is in many ways an unknown phenomenon despite his leftist leanings. His 20-year attendance at the church of his Jeremiah Wright—an anti-American as well as a 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 get elected. Nothing new here, so let’s get to the bottom of things.

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.

Domestic politics, not foreign policy, 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 regarding 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 and 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 accords with Obama’s trite presidential campaign slogan, CHANGE. Now let us illustrate the political revolution taking 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 actually involves the ideological nature of the conflict between the United States and Islamic terrorism.

On May 8, 2008, Republican Congressman Peter Hoekstra of Michigan attempted to add an amendment on the “terror lexicon” to a House Permanent Select Committee bill on intelligence funding (House Resolution 5959). Hoekstra’s amendment condemned efforts by the State Department, National Counter Terrorism Center, and 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, House Resolution 5959 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 relativism, a doctrine that conduces to a soft and non–judgmental attitude toward acts of terrorism, be it the kidnapping and beheading of journalist Daniel Pearl by Muslims in Pakistan, the Muslim suicide bombing of school buses in Jerusalem, or the murder of thousands of innocent people by the Muslim suicide attack on the New York World Trade Center! Indeed, 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 policy of appeasement of Islam, hence a policy that endangers Israel’s existence.

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 is nothing less than regime change.

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*More on Brzezinski at http://thejewinyellow.blogspot.com/2008/08/brzezinskiobama-axis.html