Michael Oren has been on the receiving end of a lot of abuse from the Obama administration for his memoir in which the former Israeli Ambassador to the United States detailed Washington’s hostility to the Jewish state over the past six years. But the second wave of attacks on Oren’s memoir has gone beyond the efforts of administration figures seeking to deny reality about the way the president sought to downgrade the alliance with Israel and to tilt the diplomatic playing field in the direction of the Palestinians and Iran. Now the battle over Oren’s embarrassing revelations and all-too sharp insights has shifted to false charges alleging that his criticisms of Obama were “insensitive” because of his attempt to understand the president’s thinking as well as efforts to claim that the current member of Knesset made false charges against the New York Times or a prominent Jewish critic of the Israeli government. All these allegations against Oren are false. More to the point, the attack on Michael Oren says a lot more about the liberal imperative to destroy any critic of America’s dear leader than they do about Oren’s judgment or credibility.
The most damaging allegation against Oren comes from someone who is normally a bulwark of support for Israel: Abe Foxman, the outgoing head of the Anti-Defamation League. Foxman claims in an ADL press release that Oren’s essay in Foreign Policy magazine published last Friday contained a passage that he labeled with the most damning phrase that can be uttered against someone in this all-too-politically correct age: “insensitive.”
What did Oren say? He had the chutzpah to speculate as to what had driven the clear animus against Israel that Oren observed in an up close and personal fashion during his four years as his government’s envoy in Washington. As he did in his book, Oren said he devoted a great deal of thought to trying to figure out what was at the roots of the president’s insatiable and generally unrequited (with the exception of Iran’s regime in the nuclear talks) desire for outreach to the Muslim world that was exemplified in his 2009 Cairo address and his clear belief that America should distance itself from Israel. His primary answer was that Obama was the product of the elite academic institutions where he studied, such as Columbia University where radical Palestinian intellectual Edward Said shaped attitudes toward Islam and Israel. He also noted that the president’s personal experiences had made him more predisposed to view Islam as fundamentally unthreatening and to be uncomfortable with confronting the religious roots of Islamist terrorism even to the point of refusing to label the attacks in Paris this past January as being anti-Semitic.
In addition to its academic and international affairs origins, Obama’s attitudes toward Islam clearly stem from his personal interactions with Muslims. These were described in depth in his candid memoir, Dreams from My Father, published 13 years before his election as president. Obama wrote passionately of the Kenyan villages where, after many years of dislocation, he felt most at home and of his childhood experiences in Indonesia. I could imagine how a child raised by a Christian mother might see himself as a natural bridge between her two Muslim husbands. I could also speculate how that child’s abandonment by those men could lead him, many years later, to seek acceptance by their co-religionists.
Merely referencing Obama’s family and his connections to Muslims (or even his middle name Hussein) is considered evidence of prejudice by many of the president’s supporters. But it was particularly egregious of Foxman to claim these words showed Oren was engaging in “conspiracy theories.” But Oren wasn’t claiming the president was a Muslim rather than a Christian or an agent of Islam, as some rabid Obama-haters claim. As a historian, he was merely exploring the president’s own autobiography to see what in his background helped formed a mindset that led him to see an Islamist regime like Iran as a worthy focus of American engagement.
Oren may well be accused of engaging in amateur psychoanalysis in the manner that many political observers employ in trying to get inside the head of leaders. But Oren is neither a birther nor a borderline racist, as Foxman seems to imply. Nor is it somehow prejudicial to Muslims, African-Americans, or even the president as an individual to comb his best-selling memoir for information that might explain an otherwise puzzling set of policy preferences and behaviors. Moreover it was simply false of Foxman to allege that speculation about the president’s background was Oren’s primary thesis when he spent far more space in both the Foreign Policy article and his book discussing other possible reasons. Though he claims to have often been a critic of the president’s policies toward Israel and Iran (though he has rarely been as personal or as publicly vocal in doing so as he has been in attacking Oren) Foxman seems to be following a more common pattern of behavior which consists of kowtowing to whichever party is in power in order to preserve his group’s access to the White House.
Equally egregious were other press attacks. In the Forward, Larry Cohler-Esses claims Oren wasn’t truthful when he relates a damning conversation in his book with New York Times editorial page editor Andrew Rosenthal. Oren said that Rosenthal defended his decision to allow Mahmoud Abbas write a piece that, “suggested that the Arabs had accepted the U.N.’s Partition Plan in 1947 while Israel rejected it.” To Oren’s surprise and incredulity, the editor said this historical fact was a matter of opinion. Cohler-Esses then offers a link to the Abbas piece and says Oren’s charge was untrue and that Abbas had made no such claim. Those who don’t click on the link may accept the writer’s conclusion and agree that other facts in the book might be similarly suspect. But Oren is correct. Abbas speaks of the United Nations passing a partition plan that was followed by an Israeli invasion of Palestinian land and expelling the Arabs. The passage not only omitted that the Arab and Muslim world declared war on the partition resolution and that five Arab armies invaded Israel on the day it was born. He also clearly implied that it was the Israelis who rejected the UN vote and the Arabs who were its supporters. The only person whose credibility — or reading comprehension — that is at fault here is Cohler-Esses. Oren’s charge against the Times and Rosenthal stand up to scrutiny. But for some liberals attacking the Times is just as offensive as calling out Obama for his policies.
Another such example comes from Haaretz’s Barak Ravid, who writes that Oren compared former New Republic editor Leon Wieseltier’s antagonism to Prime Minister Netanyahu to anti-Semitism. But, here again, the critics are distorting the truth. It was Wieseltier who admitted that his attitude was “pathological.” Ravid tries to paint Oren as attacking all liberal Jews as self-hating or fearful when the book says nothing of the kind, but does point out that some on the left had abandoned Israel, a statement so obviously true that it doesn’t need any defense.
The point here of these attacks on Oren by the left as well as groups that clearly fear the wrath of the administration is that they are not content to argue against the former ambassador’s straight-forward and painfully obvious thesis about Obama. Some on the right, like Israel Hayom’s Ruthie Blum, think Oren is far too soft on Obama. Oren absolves him of any feelings of hatred toward Israel and often cites examples of his support in what seems like a self-consciously even-handed approach to the subject. But for the sin of pointing out the president’s clear decision to distance the U.S. from Israel and to unsuccessfully embrace the Muslim world and trying to find a reason for this decision, Oren’s must be not merely be criticized by the left, the historian-turned-diplomat-turned-Knesset member must be destroyed.
