ZOA Op-ed in Times of Israel: Obama Sympathetic to Radical Islam?
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August 18, 2015

Critics repeatedly claim that the reason President Barack Obama agreed to a catastrophic nuclear deal with Iran is his naiveté, his ineptness, and his being out negotiated. Does Obama’s record validate that thesis? Or is there evidence that President Obama’s feelings toward Islam may require a different conclusion.

President Obama attended Pastor Jeremiah Wright’s anti-America, anti-Israel church for 20 years while calling Wright a “great man and my mentor.” Obama attended radical Muslim racist Louis Farahkan’s Million Man March in Washington – but refused to attend the four million man march against radical Islamic terrorism in Paris. Obama’s closest friends include Rashid Khalidi, Columbia professor, an extremist anti-Israel activist. There are pictures of President Obama having dinner with anti-Israel activists Professors Rashid Khalidi and Edward Said.

Although Obama has called American police and much of America racist, he has refused to ever utter the term, “Islamic terrorist” when Jihadists murdered eighteen US soldiers in Ford Hood and Tennessee and said nothing when two Islamic terrorists attempted to murder hundreds of Americans at a Mohammed cartoon drawing event in Texas. He’s even ordered that federal counter-terrorism training materials used for law enforcement and national security communities to delete such terms.

Maybe this shouldn’t have been surprising since Obama delayed US votes on sanctions on Iran for over a year, fought against additional sanctions, and didn’t fully implement the sanctions that the US Congress passed.

It may surprise you to learn that during his first campaign for president, Obama stated that Hezbollah and Hamas have “legitimate claims” (NY Times, May 16, 2008). And during the latest Hamas war against Israel, Obama sent Hamas $47 million, urged Israel to accept an early ceasefire, refused sending critical arms to Israel for several days, and unnecessarily stopped US commercial flights to Israel for a short period.

Moreover, President Obama not only didn’t condemn the Palestinian Authority (PA) for forming an alliance with Hamas, but proclaimed he was going to continue funding the PA despite this, even though Hamas’ charter calls for the destruction of Israel and the murder of every Jew! That didn’t surprise me since, during a meeting at the White House with Jewish leaders that I attended, President Obama stated we Jews should speak to our Israeli friends and relatives and search our souls see if we’re serious about peace. “You and the Israelis think since Israel’s economy is good, there’s little terrorism, so peace is overrated…but Mahmoud Abbas and the PA are sincere about peace.” [Mahmoud Abbas is a Holocaust minimizer, who, with Yasser Arafat, co-founded the terrorist group Fatah.]

What other Arab groups did Obama side with? When he gave his first major speech on the Middle East in Cairo, he invited the Muslim Brotherhood, an outlawed terrorist group to attend, despite pleadings against this from US ally Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak. When Mubarak was forced from office, why did Obama embrace the terrorist Muslim Brotherhood who came to power, but was cold to new moderate Egyptian president, Abdel Fatah Al- Sisi?

Furthermore, why did Obama publicly support rallies to oust US ally Mubarak from office, yet refused to support rallies to oust the genocidal, anti-American, anti Israel President Achmadinejad of the Islamic Republic of Iran, America’s enemy? He was also silent about continuous Iranian rallies, even after the agreement was finalized, calling for “Death to America and Israel,” while Iran vowed support for Hamas, Hezbollah, and Syria. And Obama said nothing about Iran’s executing 1,000 political dissidents a year, executing gays, imprisoning journalists, and closing dozens of opposition newspapers.

Maybe this shouldn’t have been surprising since Obama delayed US votes on sanctions on Iran for over a year, fought against additional sanctions, and didn’t fully implement the sanctions that the US Congress passed.

When it came to Islamic terrorists in Guantanamo Prison, he released many of them despite experts designating them as “high risk” to commit future terrorist attacks. Moreover, he released five Islamic terrorist leaders of the Taliban in return for one US deserter, Bowe Bergdahl. Why? Also, President Obama has sent radical Islamists like Salam Al -Marayati and Feisel Abdul Rauf on speaking tours to represent the United States. This is despite the fact that Marayati called for Israel’s destruction, said Israel may be responsible for 9-11 and defended the rights of Holocaust deniers – while Rauf said US policies are an “accessory” to the 9-11 attack, that “the US had more Muslim blood on its hands than Al Qaeda has on its hands of non-Muslims, refused to condemn Hamas, and speaks of a “Sharia compliant America.”

Why did President Obama make a deal with the radical Islamic terrorist State of Iran that doesn’t dismantle their nuclear program, allows nuclear weapons in 10 years or less, requires 24 days or more lead time for inspecting non-designated nuclear facilities, demands the US and others help Iran protect its facilities from sabotage, and provides hundreds of billions of dollars in sanctions relief that will surely be used to fund and arm terrorist groups around the world causing a dramatic increase in Islamic terrorism? Why did Obama leak Israel’s secret agreement with Azerbaijan to allow Israeli warplanes to refuel there, during a possible attack on Iran’s nuclear facility, sabotaging any Israeli attempt to destroy Iran’s nuclear program? Former Saudi Arabia ambassador to the US said Obama knowingly made a bad agreement, while renowned African American intellectual Thomas Sowell, of Stanford’s Hoover Institute, wrote that the Iran deal “requires us to think the unthinkable, that we have elected a man for whom America’s best interests are not his top priority.”

Is it really a wonder that we’re hardly fighting the radical terrorist ISIS by only flying 13 bombing raids a day against them, when military officials say the way to destroy ISIS is by flying hundreds of raids a day as we did against Iraq.

In light of all this and more, maybe we should have expected President Obama to proclaim at his UN speech on September 25, 2012, “The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.”

As the great two-time Nobel prize- winning chemist Linus Pauling used to say to me after we had analyzed data from an experiment, “Mort, what does the evidence require us to believe?” I am now compelled to ask, “What does all the evidence about President Obama’s actions require us to believe about the President and radical Islam?” The evidence requires us to painfully conclude that President Barack Hussein Obama is sympathetic to radical Islam.

This article was published by Times of Israel and may be found here.

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