I spoke a little while ago with Omri Ceren, a friend who writes the Mere Rhetoric blog. It’s fair to say we have very different political outlooks—our takes on Dennis Ross’ interview with the JPost were quite disparate—and Ceren has not only been a skeptic of Barack Obama but an articulate antagonist.
He blogged like crazy last night to get in all his final words before, he believes, Americans generally and Jews specifically make a catastrophic mistake in electing Barack Obama. In other words, Ceren warned us: He’s our problem now.
Again, I disagree with his assessments of Obama, but, in fairness to a perspective that gets less time on this blog, I refer you to a post he wrote yesterday under the headline, “70 Percent Of American Jews Ready To Say “We Didn’t Know” When Obama Detonates US-Israel Alliance (Plus: They Most Definitely Know).”
Here Ceren attacks all the different ways liberal Jews have defended Obama. Some, I think, fall short. But the closing paragraph is worth repeating because it highlights a sentiment many on the right have been feeling for a long time. (In fact, after originally publishing this, I received an e-mail from the California Republican Jewish Coalition that included viewing party details and a link to Ceren’s piece.)
“Any honest person who says that Obama will be anything but a disaster for the US-Israel alliance is either a breathtaking idiot or in willful denial,” Ceren wrote. “If American Jews have any decency, they’ll at least spare everyone their pathetic “we couldn’t have known” hand-wringing when Obama’s foreign policy turns out to be exactly what his top advisers promise. But given their behavior during this election, I’m not hopeful.
I am hopeful—particularly in the likelihood that these words are not prophetic. Like I said yesterday, we’ll know soon enough.
