Britannia Radio

Washington Insider with Ronald Kessler

Jewish Leader: Jewish Support for Obama Sinking Fast Thursday, October 8, 2009 2:56 PM By: Ronald Kessler Previously overwhelming support for President Obama among Jews is sinking fast, Morton Klein, president of the Zionist Organization of America, tells Newsmax. Klein cites a recent Gallup Poll that found Obama’s approval rating among Jews in America has slipped from 83 percent in January to 64 percent. “I give a lecture almost every week around the country to Jewish groups,” says Klein, whose organization of 30,000 members is the oldest pro-Israel group in the country. “I began to see serious concern after Obama’s speech in Cairo, in which he equated Palestinian suffering to Jewish suffering during the Holocaust, a ridiculous analogy. He said the Palestinian situation is equivalent to U.S. blacks in America before the civil rights movement, implying that Jews are oppressors.” Jews became even more anxious when Obama gave the Presidential Medal of Freedom to “two of the most virulent anti-Israel people in the world, Mary Robinson of Ireland and Desmond Tutu of South Africa,” Klein says. “More recently in the United Nations speech, Obama coupled supporting Israeli security with Israel fulfilling Palestinian claims and rights,” Klein says. “He could have said, I support Israel security, and I want Israel to fulfill Palestinian claims and rights. But he didn’t say that. He used the word couple, linking it.” That linkage “has never been made by any president, ever,” Klein notes. “So that was an astonishingly new statement. This really frightens both Christian and American Jewish supporters of Israel.” In that speech, Obama “condemned the occupation that started in 1967, giving it no context, not mentioning that Egypt started that war by closing the Straits of Tiran and the Suez Canal, an act of war; by bringing 100,000 Egyptian troops on the border of Israel; by throwing out the U.N. peacekeepers from the Sinai,” Klein says. Moreover, “Jews are worried that in the Cairo speech he never mentioned Iran, and more recently he seems to be doing everything he can to delay any real, true sanctions, and he seems to have taken the military option off the table,” Klein says. “So American Jews and others are now worried that he’s not even serious about doing something about this ideologically fanatical terrorist-supporting regime. He’s not doing anything about allowing them to get nuclear weapons, which they could use to harm Israel, the West, and even America.” As a child of survivors of the Holocaust, Klein says he was particularly offended by Obama’s comparison of the suffering of Palestinians with the Nazis’ murder of 6 million Jews during the Holocaust. “I found this to be an abominable, odious, and ridiculously false analogy,” he says. While Klein’s parents survived, his father lost his eight brothers and sisters and all his aunts and uncles in Nazi concentration camps. Klein’s mother lost half of her family. When it comes to Israel, “It’s tragic to realize that Obama’s sympathies and feelings are not that far from his mentor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright,” Klein says. Based on the president’s speeches and many of his foreign policy appointments, Klein thinks Obama “may become the most hostile president to Israel ever.” Ronald Kessler is chief Washington correspondent of Newsmax.com. View his previous reports and get his dispatches sent to you free via  e-mail. Go here now.