Last week saw Julian Kossoff blogging ebulliently about the strength of American Jewish support for Barack Obama. Not even “the unprecedented tension between the White House and Israel [can] break the bond,” he trilled. Now I realize Julian seems to see his role in life as reassurer to the goyim that Jews are Kumbaya-singing liberals — nothing like what he calls “the noisy neo cons and the Commentary crowd” and especially those cheeky, pushy Israelis. So I’m almost a little sorry to rain on his parade, but, sorry JK… not so fast.
One of New York City’s most famous and influential Jews, former mayor Ed Koch, a longtime Democrat — and longtime mayor (he governed New York for eleven years) — is showing distinct signs of buyer’s remorse. And anecdotal evidence gathered by him — and me in my sojourns around New York and New Jersey — suggest that Hiz Honor’s emotional trajectory is fairly representative of a growing disenchantment among Jews who voted for Obama.
The “falling out of love,” the term Mayor Koch used in an August commentary where he began expressing doubts, has been gradual. First there was the handling of the health care bill. Then the President’s failure to extract quid pro quos from Russia and China, then the “underwear bomber” affair. But it was Obama’s recent treatment of Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House (refusing to allow photographs, sequestering the world leader in a room and then leaving him there while he went to have dinner with his family with the instruction “call me if anything changes”) that seems to have pushed the rambunctious former mayor over a kind of edge.
Several days ago Koch, who is still a practising lawyer, caused a media stir by publishing a commentary titled “Never Again Should We Be Silent”. The essay, which declares that “President Obama’s abysmal attitude toward the state of Israel and his humiliating treatment of Prime Minister Netanyahu is shocking” was widely reproduced in other media. He received about 500 emails (overwhelmingly supportive of his point, he told me), and then there was the kicker, on April 1, (and, no it wasn’t an April Fool’s joke). He went on the Fox Business News network where he told host Neil Cavuto, “I believe the Obama administration is willing to throw Israel under the bus in order to please the Muslim nations.”
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