Letter: Article attacking Obama was not a reasoned critique

The column “Evidence shows Obama is anti-Israel” in the September Chronicle is hardly a reasoned critique of President Obama’s policies.

The authors begin by trotting out favorite bogeymen of 2008, notably Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers, who are somehow Obama’s “primary mentors.” What this has to do with Obama’s view of Israel is unclear.

Exhibit B is a list of foreign policy advisors whose common sin appears to be willingness to criticize the policies of the Israeli government, and a failure to condemn the Arabs as much as the article’s writers would like.

The authors decry Obama’s famous Cairo speech as a one-sided diatribe “equating Israel with the Nazis” — hoping, I assume, that we will not go to the web and (re-)read the speech for ourselves.

They misrepresent Obama’s position on Palestinian relations, claiming falsely that he “demanded a complete halt to construction” in areas under negotiation and that he “supported final borders to be the pre-1967 borders.” Obama does think a halt to construction would be a positive step (New York Times, Nov. 9, 2010), but so do many Israelis. And it is a fact of plane geometry that the negotiated borders of a future Palestinian state, whatever its shape, will be not too dissimilar from those of 1967.

The writers end with a critique of foreign aid to Israel under Obama. None of the criticism holds up to scrutiny. This aid and our military cooperation have been praised at the highest levels of the Israeli government (New York Times, Sept. 4, opinion article by Haim Saban). Criticizing Obama for failing to double the current enormous aid level is bizarre.

From the start, the writers tip their ideological hand by characterizing Obama as anti-Israel. This kind of rhetorical inflation is unfortunately characteristic of what passes for conservative analysis today. I don’t think it deserved space in The Chronicle.

Shorewood