“The spectacle of labeling Senator Schumer and other opponents of the controversial Iran nuclear deal as ‘warmongers’ who are more loyal to Israel than America is the lowest form of gutter politics seen in our country since Joe McCarthy,” wrote Rabbis Marvin Hier and Abraham Cooper, Dean and Founder and Associate Dean respectively of the Simon Wiesenthal center for human rights.
“We fear such hateful rhetoric between now and next month’s historic vote will legitimize mainstream hate and anti-Semitism” and reduce the discussion to a “disagreement between the US and Israel,” they wrote.
While many critics of the President’s nuclear deal with Iran are careful not to appear guilty of the fault they condemn and focus on the administration or “officials” rather than attacking the President directly, some Republican presidential candidates have implied and have gone as far to accuse President Obama of anti-Semitism. Many Democratic Jews deplore such tactics as cynical attempts to win the Jewish vote by further driving a wedge between Jewish supporters of Israel and the President. Mike Huckabee caused a media frenzy when he said the Iran deal was the same as Obama “marching the Israelis to the doors of the ovens.” Many expressed outrage not just that the remark exploited the Holocaust, but that it depicted Obama as a Nazi. Some opponents of the deal said, if a Holocaust analogy should have been used at all, comparing President Obama to Nelville Chamberlain, who sighed a failed peace deal with Hitler, would have been more appropriate. Republican Presidential candidate Ben Carson, who has tended to be outspoken in the past, blatantly accused President Obama of anti-Semitism. It wasn’t any particular statement President Obama made that caused Carson to draw this conclusion, but his general perceived indifference concerning Israel’s plight.
Carson told Fox News, “I think anything is anti-Semitic that is against the survival of the state that is surrounded by enemies and people who want to destroy them. To act like everything is normal there and that these people are paranoid, I think that is anti-Semitic.” Carson said that on a recent trip to Israel he couldn’t find a single person “who didn’t feel this Administration has turned its back on Israel.”
Whether one agrees or disagrees with Carson’s statement that the Obama Administration’s perceived lack of concern regarding Israel is actual anti-Semitism, no one can doubt Iran’s position on Israel, a country it would like to eliminate. Khameini didn’t mince words about the Jewish State, “This barbaric, wolflike and infanticidal regime of Israel which spares no crime, has no cure but to be eliminated.”
When Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic talked to Secretary Kerry about what Khameini, whose country will soon have $100 billion cash unfrozen, could possibly have meant by that statement, Kerry responded, “I think they have a fundamental ideological confrontation with Israel at this particular moment. Whether or not that translates into active steps, to quote, ‘Wipe it’ you know … wipe it off the map. I don’t know the answer to that. They’ve got 80,000 rockets in Hezbollah pointed at Israel, and any number of choices could have been made. They didn’t make the bomb when they had material for 10 to 12. They’ve signed an agreement where they say they’ll never try to make one and we have a mechanism in place to prove that. So I don’t want to get locked into a debate. It’s a waste of time here.” The optimistic take on Kerry’s statement: Iran hasn’t tried to destroy Israel directly so it probably won’t. The other scenario: Iran just hasn’t gotten around to it yet.