The candidates who are boycotting AIPAC include senators Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, and Bernie Sanders, as well as Beto O’Rourke, Pete Buttigieg, Julian Castro, and Howard Schultz. According to NBC, “the candidates’ decisions to skip the prominent pro-Israel lobbying group’s conference come one day after liberal group MoveOn.org called on all 2020 presidential candidates to steer clear of the event.”
The Democrats are now officially the party of Jew-hatred. This is largely due to the disastrous presidency of Barack Hussein Obama. It was Obama, with his consistently shabby treatment of Benjamin Netanyahu and relentless demonization of Israel, who mainstreamed and normalized anti-Semitism among the Democrats.
I warned about it all. In May 2008, before Obama was elected, a reader invited me to a senior-level AIPAC event at Cipriani’s. I went up to the Executive Director, Howard Kohr, and said that I understood AIPAC was “nonpartisan, but Obama will be lethal for the Jews.” Kohr scoffed. I went on to relate all that I had unearthed in my two years of relentless investigation of Obama, and I laid it out, point by point, fact by fact, with as little hyperbole as possible. Kohr shook his head. He would have none of it. We are nonpartisan, he insisted. To what point are you nonpartisan? If there is a candidate, a party, an official that is a Jew-hater, do you maintain neutrality, like Switzerland? He just smiled and walked away.
I meticulously documented Obama’s Jew-hatred, and his entourage of Jew-haters, in my book The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War On America. I noted in that book that the American Jews who voted so overwhelmingly for Obama could have and should have seen his anti-Semitism and how he would normalize Jew-hatred in the Democrat Party. Take, for example, of a March 2007 account by the pro-Palestinian blogger Ali Abunimah at the the Electronic Intifadah website. Abunimah recounted how Obama had adopted a pro-Israel position as a matter of political expediency as his national aspirations developed. “The last time I spoke to Obama,” Abunimah recalled, “was in the winter of 2004 at a gathering in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood. He was in the midst of a primary campaign to secure the Democratic nomination for the United States Senate seat he now occupies. But at that time polls showed him trailing.”
When Abunimah greeted him, Obama “responded warmly,” and volunteered an apology for not being more outspoken against Israel: “Hey,” said the candidate to Abunimah, “I’m sorry I haven’t said more about Palestine right now, but we are in a tough primary race. I’m hoping when things calm down I can be more up front.” Abunimah added: “He referred to my activism, including columns I was contributing to the The Chicago Tribune critical of Israeli and US policy, ‘Keep up the good work!’”
Abunimah’s piece — and Obama’s numerous anti-Semitic associations — got little attention. Throughout his life Barack Obama has been close friends with numerous virulent anti-Semites: Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayers, Khalid al-Mansour, Rashid Khalidi and others.
It may be an old cliché, but it’s true: show me your friends, and I’ll show you who and what you are.
American Jews should have noted this, and noted it well. Instead, they fell for Obama’s smooth talk. But when Obama became president, he was true to his word to Abunimah, and turned viciously against Israel. And the whole world should have seen it coming.
Everything that is happening now in the Democratic Party — the relentless pandering to the Jew-haters Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the abject failure and collapse of the effort to rebuke Omar for her Jew-hatred, even indirectly, the boycott of AIPAC by the presidential candidates — I predicted and warned about. All my warnings are coming true. What does Howard Kohr have to say now?