By Rabbi Ben Kamin
ENCINITAS, California — What better—and more painful—indication of the free-fall of American stature? Within hours of the signing of this shameful nuclear “deal” with Iran, the US Secretary of State, John Kerry, was publicly pleading with the Iranians to release four American hostages who have been held captive by the regime for years.
It hurts to watch this. I like President Obama—his articulate and reflective persona, his intelligence and wryness, and his personal fidelity are tethered to the impossibly racial narrative of his presidency. Restrained and dignified, he has courageously chosen just to be our current president more than being our first black president.
But really, Mr. President? Do you possibly gloss over the bitter irony of this Iranian humiliation? Can you be so deeply sensitive and eloquent in Charleston, SC when eulogizing our fellow citizens gunned down while studying scripture in their church but then justify the abandoning of our fellow nationals to the world’s most notorious sponsor of terror and repression?
Can you bravely fight for affordable national health care and same-sex marriage yet sell out to the most malicious purveyors of citizen massacres, systemic misogyny, and social bigotry on this planet? Can you pardon domestic criminals in the same week that you embolden the primary underwriters of global terrorism since World War II?
The ayatollahs of Iran and its acolytes are the killers of music, literature, art, democracy, athleticism, spirituality, and the be-headers of human intellectual creativity.
And why do so many Americans not understand that the cunning bosses of the Iranian tyranny are, literally, the same, now-graying jihadists who overthrew the government in 1979, stormed the US Embassy, and barbarically held our citizens hostage for 444 days? They shamed us then, they mock us now, they will haunt us indefinitely.
It’s hard to comprehend the magnitude of this tragically historic mistake now committed by our country. I have immediate family in Israel, a daughter, a brother, cousins, nieces and nephews. They are all in decidedly more danger today than ever as a result of this naïve and sad sell-out.
Unlike the United States or Iran, but directly because of these two improbable partners, Israel is the only nation whose existence is existentially threatened by this treachery. No other free and advanced republic has been in this predicament since the end of World War II.
This is not an acceptable outcome for the children of America’s most staunch and unswerving ally that stands up and out in the most dangerous and viciously anti-American region on this planet. It is, at best, the moral equivalent of Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of Nazi Germany in 1938; at worst, the scoffing counterpart to the Soviet Nonaggression Pact with Hitler made in 1939.
I try to be objective and cognizant of President Obama’s idealism and his affinity for Islam. He spent his formative years in Indonesia and undoubtedly saw and experienced the benevolence of the pure faith—it imbues his childhood memories and wistfully draws his soul into a nostalgic denial.
Perhaps it is subjectively difficult for him to believe that so much evil does actually lurk in the world he inhabited as a boy. Whatever it is, Mr. Obama seems to identify a lot more with Indonesian folklore than he does with Israeli reality. It all adds up to a maddening paradigm:
Why does the president send drones to kill Muslims and then dispatch emissaries to make a dubious deal with Muslims who will then kill more Americans and Israelis with nuclear missiles?
Mr. President, great has been your very challenging tenure but atomized will be your legacy. Woe unto the Children of Israel—all over the world.
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Rabbi Kamin is a freelance writer based in the San Diego suburb of Encinitas, California. You may comment to ben.kamin@sdjewishworld.com
We were told that this administration would walk away from any bad deal. By what stretch of the imagination can any president like that be called a good president? If the Iranians, on their own, had drawn up an agreement years ago, it would not have made us concede this much. For all intents and purposes the Iranians can continue as before, and in the end they will be supplying the Islamist terrorists the fruits of all their accomplishments. This is not a good president. Rather he is the Manchurian Candidate.– Jerome Liner, Cincinnati, Ohio
What is painful is to read this astonishing display of disconnect between an obvious reverence to a leader who clearly does not deserve it and the evil nature of this same leader, for he is the one who has led the pseudo-negotiations to this shameful surrender. Do you seriously believe it was unintentional, or that it was the work of underlings? Isn’t it time for the good rabbi to walk away from his self-inflicted delusions and face the fact, as painful it is for this obvious idealist, that Obama has been bad news across the board and is proving to be plain perilous for us and for Israel? Wake up already. – J.J. Surbeck, San Diego