Dear Family & Friends,

A brave whistleblower is being slammed! That’s the prime media word of the decade: Slammed! It is rude, crude, strong, & usually true. Usually only the ‘good’ get slammed. So…Four prime examples of good whistleblowers who acted according to their consciences about dangerous events or people & got viciously ‘slammed’ are Jonathan Pollard, Edward Snowden, Geert Wilders & Pamela Geller. (There are many others but you can fill in the blanks.)

Michael Oren was a stalwart Israeli Ambassador to America from July 20, 2009 to September 30, 2013. He was chosen for his expertise on American diplomatic history regarding Israel. He has withstood the “slings & arrows” of anti-Israelism with strength. Now he is publishing a book about his relationships with the American Administration during a tumultuous 6 years. He brought it to fruition early because it has much to say about ongoing negotiations with Iran’s Monstrous-Nuclear- Ambitions just as agreements are supposed to be signed releasing Iran’s sanctioned Billions of dollars for Iran’s ‘promise’ NOT to cooperate with the Western World monitoring & controlling its Nuclear juggernaut.

Oren’s book & his several recent articles in major media outlets have been vigorously ‘Slammed’ for his powerful critique about (i.e. bad-mouthing) President Obama especially. Somehow, we’re not supposed to make Obama mad. “We might get in trouble” if we do. I seem to hear: “Don’t rock the boat.” “Sha’ Shtill!” Bow down to the poritz (the powerful landlord). Keep a low profile.”

YUCK!

Haven’t we learned yet that such cowardly behavior is simply viewed as weakness &, thereby invites further & stronger attacks – witness what began 85 years ago? It is outright dangerous to accept these slings & arrows of outrageous fortune. We must take up our cudgels to fight them.

Below are several articles by Michael Oren, about Michael Oren & Michael Oren in conversation with heretofore somewhat hostile media ‘pundits’. I’ve sent you some of these articles before but thought you all might be able to use a Retrospective Compendium for your archives, research & letter-writing ammunition.

So, dig in. Enjoy the tumult. Participate with your own media outlets, organizations. Work to stifle the ongoing vicious BDS (Boycott, Divestment & Sanctions) campaigns that are boiling up across the world. Israel is under attack & that means that all Jews are also under attack – which means danger for the rest of the world as well. Use your anger at the injustice & unfairness of BDS-isms to fuel & energize your public diplomacy activities (formerly called “hasbara” Information-giving). Monitor your media, local & national as I’ve been teaching & urging since 1975. Counter the negatives with factual positives. Don’t give up our Ship of State: the Jewish State of Israel & the Jewish people.

All the very best, Gail/Geula/Savta/Savta Raba x 2/Mom

1.Sha’i Ben-Tekoa: Excerpt from June 25, 2015 Webcast: “Bravo, Michael Oren!”

2.A Former Israeli Ambassador Takes Aim At Obama—& American Jewry By Jeffrey Goldberg The Atlantic

4.Michael Oren, Profile in Courage by David Bedein

5.Blowback from the Oren revelations by Isi Liebler

6.Michael Oren is a Zionist, a patriotic American and a courageous fighter By Ted Belman

7.Michael Oren: Criticism of Obama had to be made by Yoaz Hendel

8.Why Obama is wrong about Iran being ‘rational’ on nukes

9.How Obama Opened His Heart to the ‘Muslim World’ BY MICHAEL OREN

1.Sha’i Ben-Tekoa: Excerpt from June 25, 2015 Webcast: “Bravo, Michael Oren!” I watch American Jews like Abe Foxman and now Douglas Bloomfield, formerly with AIPAC, who opined today in JPost against Michael Oren’s portrait of Obama and his deliberate acts of hostility to Israel. Bloomfield and Foxman and their ilk of IBJs, these Inside-the-Beltway-Jews, ultimately makes me feel sorry for them. While making a living formally opining on Israel and its rights, they remain Americans whose careers and respected places in fashionable circles are far more important to them than the lives of us Jews living here who have to live with the consequences of Obama’s decisions far from them.

Bloomfield today praised Foxman for dismissing Oren’s “conspiracy theories” and his reference to his Muslim heritage. Foxman had urged Oren to “walk back his unjustified attacks on Obama,” such as stating that from Day One Obama’s agenda was “championing the Palestinian cause and a nuclear accord with Iran.” And I ask, “What is wrong with that?”

In January 2009, the U.S. was in the throes of its worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Obama takes office and his first telephone as president is to the Holocaust Denying Muslim terrorist Abu Mazen. How is Michael Oren supposed to interpret that behavior?

Bloomfield, in his own hysterical, Thomas Friedman-esque need to broadcast his loyalty to his president vs. the prime minister of Israel, wrote, “Who can forget Netanyahu’s persistent meddling in partisan U.S. domestic politics, his endorsement of Mitt Romney, his Congressional speech attacking Obama’s Iran policy and his rude Oval Office lecture on live television for a lesson in Mideast history?”

This guy is a real jackass. I don’t recall Bibi ever endorsing Mitt Romney. Bloomfield complains about Bibi’s persistent meddling in U.S. domestic politics…which is different from Obama coming here and addressing a handpicked audience of leftist students to urge them to oppose their prime minister’s leadership?

And as for his Congressional speech attacking Obama’s Iran policy: Bibi was invited by the Congress of the United States that gave him a rousing welcome and applauded his views on Iran vs. Obama’s views. Obama’s are leading to Iran obtaining a nuclear bomb that the Iranians publicly express a wish to use to destroy Israel, G-d forbid, and Bloomfield protests Netanyahu’s opposition to Obama’s policy and behavior.

And as for Bibi’s allegedly rude lecture on Mideast history: Does Bloomfield really believe Obama knows this history better than Bibi? Worse, he omitted the context. Bibi was responding to Obama’s knife in the back, his surprise adoption of the Arab demand that Israel return to the 1949 cease-line, which is a rejection of UN Security Council Resolution 242 that does not call for that but for new lines.

Much of my book records the constant rejection over decades (!) of Res. 242 by the Arabs for decades because it made no reference to Balestinians and their alleged right to a state. As Abu Mazen’s Holocaust Denial is a perverse re-writing of history, so has been the invention of the Balestinians by him. They really are two sides of the same coin.

For my money, I thought Bibi’s lecture in the Oval Office was much too tame given the gravity of the offense.

And no less offensive in Bloomfield’s eyes is Oren’s attitude to the American Jews surrounding Obama, Jews like Bloomfield himself. Michael Oren rightly noted that they are non-Orthodox (he himself is not religious), intermarried and liberal, working inside the Obama administration, and Oren sees them as having “a hard time understanding Israel’s character.”

For this reason, Oren suggests that Israel can no longer count on American Jews. Oren also says such American Jews are “disproportionately represented in the U.S. media and are largely responsible for American media’s anti-Israel coverage.”

Bravo, Michael Oren. For sure, Bloomfield would end his op-ed to his opposition to Oren’s opinion in this regard, with which I heartily concur.

If not for LTF and Roger Cohen and Jeffrey Goldberg, and the State Department Jewboys and those at National Public Radio including the current ambassador to Israel, Daniel Shapiro, who demanded an apology for Oren’s book, the American MSM might be less hostile.

Oren is right on target. With 80% of American Jews, twice, voting for Obama, they are like the 80%, the Sages told us, who refused to leave Egypt on the night of the Exodus.

Of course, Douglas Bloomfield must chastise Michael Oren. And I look forward to, if we ever get it, the reaction of Alan Dershowitz, one of those American Jews who twice voted for Obama. So far, though, counselor Dershowitz maintains radio silence.

THE ATLANTIC GLOBAL

2.A Former Israeli Ambassador Takes Aim at Obama—& American Jewry BY JEFFREY GOLDBERG 11:20 AM ET The historian and Knesset member Michael Oren accuses the president of distancing the U.S. from Israel, and calls out left-wing Jews and Israel’s Jewish critics in the American press.

Michael Oren Benjamin Myers / Reuters

In a recent post, I suggested that the intervention of two men, the former U.S. national security advisor Tom Donilon and the former Israeli ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren, might help improve the dysfunctional relationship between the Obama administration and the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

At the time I wrote this, both men had reputations as people who were concerned about preserving the extraordinarily complicated, and extraordinarily close, U.S.-Israel relationship, and both had spent a good deal of time calming the waters between Obama and Netanyahu. Today, Donilon maintains that reputation. As for Oren …

Put it this way: If Goldblog readers would allow me to withdraw the suggestion, I’d be much obliged. Oren has created a new role for himself: acid critic of the Obama administration and of left-leaning American Jews (especially in the press and in the White House) who, he believes, are trading on their Jewishness when they criticize Israel. Oren’s critique, at its heart, is simple: Obama, in part because he wanted to reconcile the U.S. with the “Muslim world” (a very large, ill-defined, and politically complicated concept, in Oren’s mind), decided to distance the United States from Israel; to surprise Israel by altering U.S. Middle East policy without prior notice; and to negotiate with Israel’s most potent enemy without alerting Israeli leaders.

I’ve resisted weighing in on the various eruptions surrounding Oren’s new book,Ally, as well as the series of provocative op-eds he wrote in the lead-up to the book’s release last week, for a number of reasons: 1) I’m busy; 2) Oren and I have been friends for a decade, from a time when he was just another ink-stained wretch rather than a high-ranking diplomat and, now, a member of the Knesset; and 3) I’m mentioned in the book, which I read in galleys in May, quite frequently (mainly references to my interviews with Obama and Netanyahu, and also to various other controversies in which I’ve found myself enmeshed).

RELATED STORY

What Michael Oren Gets Wrong About Jewish Criticism of Israel

I decided, though, that the best course of action for me would be to interview Oren at length on his book and op-eds. This is what I did last week in New York, the night after his appearance at the 92nd Street Y, during which he was interviewed (expertly) by the writer and Friend-of-Goldblog Jonathan Rosen. An edited (but probably insufficiently condensed) transcript of our conversation can be found below. But before we get there, let me briefly unpack a couple of the controversies Oren sparked.

First, I find much of the criticism of Oren to be unfair. Ha’aretz, the left-leaning Israeli newspaper, has been running a character-assassination campaign against him for more than a week. And though I understand the general critique of the current U.S. ambassador to Israel (and now-former Oren friend) Dan Shapiro—and sympathize with his view that Oren has manipulated reality in certain places in order to advance an overly simplistic anti-Obama line—I don’t believe, as Shapiro apparently does, that Oren was motivated to criticize Obama in the manner he did out of a desire to sell books.

(Nor do I believe that Netanyahu is 100 percent at fault for tensions in the relationship.) I believe Oren was motivated by a desire to highlight what he considers to be Obama’s exceedingly dangerous approach to Iran, a country whose government seeks Israel’s annihilation. In any case, ascribing motive is a dangerous business. My views on Oren line up to some degree with those of David Rothkopf, the high panjandrum of Foreign Policy magazine, who wrote about Oren here and who also published the most incendiary of his three recent op-eds.

And about those op-eds: One of the issues here is that Oren’s opinion pieces—which appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Foreign Policy, and the Los Angeles Times—were in some ways caricatures of the book. Ally is somewhat more nuanced than any of his op-eds. In the case of the Wall Street Journal op-ed, the piece itself was more nuanced than the headline—“How Obama Abandoned Israel”—though to be fair to the headline writer, Oren paints a picture of Obama in the article that is much more one-sided than the portrayal of the president in Ally. You would not know from Oren’s op-eds that he spends much of his book praising Obama for the various good deeds the president has performed on Israel’s behalf.

It was this Wall Street Journal op-ed that angered Shapiro, and made many of Obama’s allies in Washington so upset. You’ll see our exchange below on questions of Obama’s policy shifts on Israel and on the issue of whether it is truly unprecedented for an American president to disagree publicly with Israel.

My position is radically different from Oren’s on all of this. I think he, like many Israeli officials, can be myopic on the issue. For four decades, successive Israeli governments have publicly rejected American demands (requests, pleas, remonstrations, etc.) to stop planting settlements on the West Bank. A president comes along who makes the traditional American case with a bit more alacrity, and all of a sudden the sky is falling. It is Israel’s policy of continued settlement in the West Bank—settlement that endangers the two-state solution, and therefore Israel’s future as a democracy and as a haven for the Jewish people—that puts daylight between Jerusalem and Washington, not a president who calls Israel out for its settlement policy.

The larger, more troubling controversy came with the Foreign Policy piece, in which Oren wrote the following:

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.

I grapple with Oren’s foray into psychoanalysis in our conversation below. As I understand it, Oren and his publisher rushed this book into print in advance of the June 30 deadline for the Iran nuclear agreement in order to call attention to what he perceives to be weaknesses in the deal. I wish that Oren had more tightly focused his work on a substantive critique of the Iranian regime and its intentions, and on the American approach to the nuclear issue, rather than on Obama’s alleged daddy issues. Oren has important points to make about the deal, and about the nature of the Iranian regime, and he makes them at length in his book, but his arguments have been obscured so far by these other arguments.

I do recommend you read his book for any number of reasons, not least of which is that it illuminates a clear and growing divide between the American and Israeli Jewish communities, and illustrates the way in which even a person who comes from the Israeli political center understands (and misunderstands) his brethren in America, including and especially his brethren who practice journalism.

Here is an edited version of our conversation, which, you will undoubtedly notice, reads occasionally like a transcript of two Jews yelling at each other on a park bench in Brooklyn:

Jeffrey Goldberg: So what’s with all the torn-between-two-Muslim-daddies psychobabble about Obama?

Michael Oren: In retrospect, I probably should stay away from psychoanalysis. I’m not a psychoanalyst. But these were questions I asked myself while trying to understand the president’s revolutionary approach to the Muslim world.

Goldberg: What’s so revolutionary about it?

Oren: It’s completely revolutionary.

Goldberg: It’s not.

Oren: I think President Obama would be the first person to agree that it was revolutionary. It was transformative.

Goldberg: But wait: Any president who followed George W. Bush would have sought to reset relations with the Muslim world, with Muslim nations, just to try to lower the temperature. So I don’t get how revolutionary this is. And I just don’t get how this veered into analysis of Obama’s relationship with his Muslim father.

Oren: In the book it’s more qualified than the piece I wrote for Foreign Policy. I wrote, “I don’t like armchair psychoanalysis.” I do it with Bibi too, I talk about his relationship with his father.

Goldberg: So how are you trying to resist psychoanalysis?

Oren: I try to resist it, but it is tempting for anyone who is trying to analyze these complicated figures. But anyway, you asked what was revolutionary about [Obama’s approach to the Muslim world]. First off was this very basic assumption that there’s a thing called the Muslim world, which is actually an Islamic concept. No American’s ever done that. There are only two other leaders who did this. One was Napoleon in 1798 and one was Wilhelm II in 1898. So it’s unusual.

“Obama has deep feelings about Islam. And I wanted to know where it came from.”

Goldberg: That’s not the highly controversial part. The controversial part in that is your speculation that he’s trying to reconcile with the Muslim world because he was abandoned by two Muslim fathers.

Oren: I said that I should stay away from the psychoanalysis. But in fact he writes extensively about his time in Islamic countries. He says in the Cairo speech, “I have known Islam on three continents before coming to the place of its birth … where it was revealed,” even using that line, “revealed.”

The fact that he gives a speech in Cairo, which is one of the great seats of learning of Islam—he mentions this in his speech. He didn’t give this speech in Washington, he gave this speech in Cairo, and it’s more than twice as long as the first inaugural address. It’s very long and very detailed. But there’s nowhere in that Foreign Policy article, or even in the book, where I say that reaching out to the Muslim world is bad for Israel. Never said that.

Goldberg: But you did say that he was a champion of the Palestinian cause. In your Wall Street Journal op-ed, you said that—I’m paraphrasing here—any Israeli leader would be angered that Obama championed the Palestinian cause.

Oren: He came up with—

Goldberg: George W. Bush was a champion of the Palestinian cause. He called for a Palestinian state.

Oren: He did indeed, but Obama also reversed the conditions of championing the Palestinian cause.

Goldberg: What do you mean?

Oren: Under Bush, there was a sequence. The sequence was that the Palestinians had to democratize, had to create democratic institutions, and then they would have a peace based on a two-state solution. That part about democratization and creating the basis for a viable state—the institutions—was dropped with Obama and so you get peace first, and then you think about democratization. So the order was reversed. It was subtle, but it was there.

Goldberg: Just stay with me here on Obama and his Muslim background. Do you believe that President Obama seeks reconciliation with the Muslim world for these deeply personal reasons having to do with unreturned love from Muslim father figures, and that he saw distancing the U.S. from Israel as a way to bridge the gap with—

Oren: The answer is no.

Goldberg: But you wrote something in Foreign Policy that suggests this is—

Oren: —I was trying to figure out what are the origins of his feelings toward Islam. He has deep feelings about Islam, obviously. [He] talks about them—I’m not making them up—and he has a high regard for Islam. And I wanted to know where it came from. If George Bush all of a sudden came out and expressed very strong feelings about Islam, you’d want to know where they’re coming from. I think these were legitimate questions for an ambassador to ask and to inquire about, and think about.

Goldberg: Your prime minister presumably was interested in knowing the answers.

Oren: No, I don’t think the prime minister knew the details of my research. I came to my job as an historian. I used historian tools. What do you do? You go back to the sources. So I go back and read about what [Obama] had to say about Islam, where he came from, his discussion of his family life. It’s in the first inaugural address. It’s in virtually all of his major policy speeches, certainly in the first half of his term. It’s almost an imperative question you have to ask. Where is this coming from? Did I say it was at the expense of Israel? No, I actually say in the book it’s a good thing that he’s reaching out to Islam. As long as it’s not at Israel’s expense, it’s a very good thing for Israel. It’s in the book, no one is going to look at that. And I never said that in the Foreign Policy article either.

Goldberg: But as you know, the controversy comes in part because these questions are so Dinesh D’Souzaish. I mean, why do you think you’ve stepped in it, to the degree that you agree that you stepped in it on this particular question?

Oren: Have I stepped in it? I didn’t know I’d stepped in it. I know there are people saying things that I didn’t say in the article, such as that Obama abandoned Israel to embrace Islam. It’s not there, it’s just not there. I wanted to show in this article how you go about analyzing his worldview. I thought what was interesting was the degree to which Obama’s relationship to what he called the Muslim world has not changed in light of all the profound changes that have swept across the Middle East over the past few years. For example, this is a very disciplined administration when it comes to lexicon. So you have violent extremists; we do not have Islamic terrorists. And I suggested in the opening article that one of the reasons the United States didn’t have much representation at that Charlie Hebdo march was because the march was against Islamic extremism, which would have been a problem.

“Obama determines who is in the Muslim world and who isn’t. He’s said it. ISIS is not a part of Islam.”

Goldberg: What is this argument that Obama couldn’t go to the Charlie Hebdo rally because he believes these guys were so distorting Islam—

Oren: Well, he determines who is in the Muslim world and who isn’t. He’s said it. ISIS is not a part of Islam. And the rally was called to condemn radical Islam.

Goldberg: So you think it was a deliberate attempt to avoid condemning Islam?

Oren: Yes, which is legitimate. He made a decision: “I am not going to call these guys out.” And the march was a march against radical Islam. And frankly, I could not see Obama there. I would be very, very surprised if he showed up.

Goldberg: You know, there is no president in American history who has killed more Islamist terrorists than this president.

Oren: And I say that in the book, too. In this article I was not presuming to pass judgment on whether it was bad or good. I was showing how an ambassador would view this and what kind of conclusions you could reach.

Goldberg: Let me go back to this other issue, a part that strikes me as unfair, this idea that [Obama] was so influenced by his exposure to Muslims, to Islam. There’s an omission here. Fine—it’s fair game to look at the people and ideas who influence a president. But what about his exposure to Lester Crown, Newton Minow, Abner Mikva, all of his Jewish mentors, his Jewish supporters early in his career, when he was seen as the Jewish candidate in Chicago. These are important to grapple with, too. You don’t talk about this. I mean, just over the last month, he’s shown that he wants to be a liberal champion of Israel, he talks about the justice of Zionism. I just think you’re focused so much on the Muslim side—

Oren: But again, you’re talking about the last month. I’m talking about 2009.

Goldberg: You yourself write in the book that Obama has given amazing pro-Zionist speeches, that there are different moments when he’s said things about Israel that are quite meaningful.

Oren: I mentioned one of his speeches—I think at the UN in [September] 2011—which is probably one of the most Zionist speeches ever given by an American president—

Goldberg: —Right. This doesn’t come through in your op-eds. I get it, these op-eds have to have an argument, but—

Oren: —And they can’t be too subtle. You have 700 words to make a subtle argument. In that article about Obama abandoning Israel, I talk about—

Goldberg: You don’t actually believe Obama has abandoned Israel—

Oren: No, he’s abandoned two core principles that create a lot of problems. He abandoned the idea of “no surprises” in the relationship. That’s just what I said in the op-ed.

Goldberg: Different presidents have surprised Israel in various ways—

Oren: Lots of surprises—and we surprise them. We bombed Iraq in 1981.

Goldberg: So what Obama has done is not unprecedented?

Oren: The question is whether it’s a matter of policy—whether it was a one-off here and there. But this was a policy: Obama even said, “I’m putting daylight, diplomatic daylight, between Israel and the United States.”

Goldberg: That’s the most important thing that he said on this subject to you?

Oren: No, but it’s very important. There are things that were more important.

“This was a policy: Obama even said, ‘I’m putting daylight, diplomatic daylight, between Israel and the United States.’”

Goldberg: So here’s a theory—tell me why it’s wrong. Hear me out for a second. The theory is, eight years of George W. Bush, no real progress on the peace front, and it was a close embrace between Israel and the U.S., so Obama comes in and says, maybe I’ll do a little pushing instead of embracing. That’s not a revolutionary argument.

Oren: It’s empirically wrong. Eight years of no daylight with Bush produced an Israeli pullout from Gaza—the first unilateral pullout from lands captured in 1967, at great controversy and cost to the State of Israel—and produced a full-fledged peace offer to [Palestinian Authority President] Mahmoud Abbas, all of Gaza, half of Jerusalem, and almost the entire West Bank. So it’s empirically untrue. And traditionally, historically—this is what Nixon understood. Nixon was no lover of the Jewish people, but he understood that Jews and Israelis make concessions when we feel secure. Everyone got it. [Obama] made, for whatever reason, a policy decision to put in daylight. But it was a very sophisticated policy, so he said, “We’re going to have daylight on diplomacy, but no daylight on defense.” But it doesn’t work that way. Look, I was scared of the daylight. My job as ambassador was always to go out and say, “There’s no daylight.” Because I was afraid of the daylight. It scared me because, in the Middle East, I understood nobody distinguishes between diplomatic and military daylight. There’s just daylight. So my job was always to go out and say, “There’s no daylight.”

Goldberg: It seems to me you were unleashing a lot of feelings in this book that you kept suppressed for four or five years. And one of the areas you’re most disappointed with has to do with the patterns of American Jewish life.

Oren: But also, to be fair to me, I also show my intolerance of certain patterns of Jewish life in Israel that I didn’t show as ambassador.

Goldberg: Yes.

Oren: I am revealing a lot of feelings about where we are as the Jewish people today.

Goldberg: So a couple of things stood out to me. Your criticism of Jews in the media, trying to distance themselves from Israel. By the way, Leon? [Atlantic contributing editor] Leon Wieseltier, of all people, as a guy who is showing hostility to Jews by showing hostility to Bibi?

Oren: Leon is interpreting this in a very strange way.

Goldberg: Have you talked to him?

Oren: He’s written me some very rough emails. He thinks that I’m calling him an anti-Zionist. I quote Leon in a passage about Bibi. It has nothing to do with Bibi.

Goldberg: No, it does—you wrote that the anger sparked by Bibi resembles the anger sparked by Jews, and you mention Leon in that passage as someone who has a pathological hatred of Bibi.

Oren: No, it wasn’t Jews.

Goldberg: It was Jews.

Oren: It’s all about a portrait of Bibi, which was a very hard section for me to write, as you can imagine. At some point, I realized that I was going to have to portray Netanyahu. So one thing I did was talk about attitudes toward Bibi in the press, particularly among the Israeli journalists. Then I talk about American journalists. And then I talked about how I noticed something about Bibi—the way people describe Jews as “The Other,” Bibi became “The Other.”

Goldberg: Well that seemed to follow right from your Leon Wieseltier section.

Oren: It was the furthest thing from my mind. I’m Leon’s buddy, why would I want to hurt Leon? And I write about him lovingly in the book.

Goldberg: And you have these hard feelings about [New York Times columnist] Tom Friedman—

Oren: I do, I do.

Goldberg: You kind of imply that he’s some sort of disloyal Jew—

Oren: —I have deep differences with how he’s portrayed Israel and how he’s portrayed the Middle East. Deep differences. It’s not personal. I can sit with him and have a perfectly lovely conversation. After a while, I just stopped briefing him because it was not a good use of my time. I could spend an hour with him on the phone, it wasn’t going to have any impact. OK. But I also think he said some things that were very problematic, not the least of which about Jews buying seats in Congress. That’s problematic. And, you know—

Goldberg: OK, but that’s different than calling—

Oren: —I’m hard on Jews who, because they’re Jews, feel morally compelled to be harder on Israel.

Goldberg: Then there was a description of Steve Simon [a former U.S. National Security Council official] as an “apostate” Jew. It’s a heavy word, apostate. It’s one thing to say, “A guy who was Orthodox and has become secular.”

Oren: He became very secular. He became a WASP.

Goldberg: Well, you can’t become a WASP, except if you’re Ralph Lifshitz.

Oren: Steve did his best.

Goldberg: So there are these Jews in your mind who are trying to gain position in broader American society by dumping on Netanyahu when he doesn’t deserve to be dumped on.

Oren: There were many Jews who made it big in public life and didn’t dump on him. What about that?

Goldberg: This concerns me for a couple of reasons: One, we’re talking about people who are our mutual friends, and sitting in judgment of Jews like this is—

Oren: My problem is that the Jews—it’s part of the American Jewish success story—is that they’re very prominent in the media, proportionally. And in government. I don’t expect them to be pro-Israel. My issue is with the Jewish journalists who say, “I’m Jewish, therefore I have greater credibility in criticizing Israel.”

“I’m hard on Jews who, because they’re Jews, feel morally compelled to be harder on Israel.”

Goldberg: That’s why you bring up [Washington Post columnist] Ruth Marcus.

Oren: Yeah. And Ruth, I very much like her. But she writes a domestic column, she only writes about one other country, and that’s Israel. And that was the issue I had.

I’m not expecting people who are Jewish to be more pro-Israel. I am expecting them, if they are members of the Jewish people, I expect them, as I said in the book, to be grateful that we are living in a moment which is totally unique in the history, when we have these two vastly successful, powerful Jewish communities, and we should be grateful. But that’s the whole thrust of that position—it comes down to the question of ingratitude, and what I have a problem with is Jewish journalists who say, “I’m Jewish, but I’m not those Jews.”

Goldberg: So this is something new that you’ve discovered in America when you came as ambassador—a slow dissolution of the bonds between these two groups? What are we talking about?

Oren: Yes, but then I also have an historic perspective. I knew it happened in the ’30s, I knew it happened. In the 1967 war, which was the foundational event for me, tens of thousands of American Jews went out to protest in the weeks before the war. You know, during the waiting period. They were protesting against the Vietnam War. They weren’t demonstrating for Israel.

Goldberg: So this gets to my point. There’s this feeling that runs through the book that you feel betrayed by American Jewry—by the community from which you come.

Oren: I felt sad. I feel sad. Last night I gave a talk in which I spoke about the fact that they didn’t understand us. We don’t understand them sometimes as well. But American Jews have a very hard time understanding—not just remembering, but understanding—what it was to withdraw from Lebanon in 2000 and get thousands of rockets fired at you. To withdraw from Gaza in 2005 and get thousands of rockets fired at you. What it was to embark on the Oslo peace process and get a thousand Jews blown up, including my sister-in-law.

Goldberg: This book is a sort of document of a relationship slowly unraveling. A relationship of two ships passing in the night. I’m not talking about America and Israel, I’m talking about two groups of Jews.

Oren: I don’t disagree. The book was a cry. My path took me into Israel, gave me an Israeli perspective that most American Jews don’t have, but I never lost track of where I came from. I talk a lot about Women of the Wall [an organization advocating for women to pray at the Western Wall], because I realized that the Women of the Wall went to the heart of the rift between us. That the Western Wall that was supposed to unite us was going to tear us apart irrevocably as a people. If one woman had been seriously injured—God forbid killed—then not just the Jewish people, but Israel and the United States, would be torn apart. I lived with that fear all the time. Much as I lived with the fear about what was going on with Iran, I lived with the fear of an American Jewish woman being hurt at the Wall. I spent hours and hours going back and forth with Israelis, trying to get them to understand. What we saw as a matter of law and order and crowd control and Supreme Court ordinances and status-quo agreements, Americans saw as freedom of religion, women’s rights, free speech.

Goldberg: It’s two ships.

Oren: This book was not easy for me. This book came from a very deep and caring place. And at the end of the book, I spend four or five pages talking about what we can do to change it, to bring it back from the brink. It’s interesting, the first draft of the book ended—you’re going to appreciate this —with chickenshit.

Goldberg: Chickenshit for dessert.

Oren: I must have spent 20 hours on Israeli television trying to find the Hebrew equivalent for the word “chickenshit.” Nobody knew. I couldn’t do it. Chickenshit—it doesn’t work in Hebrew.

Goldberg: Pachdan?

Oren: Yeah, but it’s much stronger than that, and pachdan doesn’t convey the crassness of it. And I said in my initial version, what I really wanted to say was, “Stop.” And then I go into this, stop. Like scream, shout, “Stop! Stop this stuff, this is nuts. This is nuts.”

Goldberg: Chickenshit was a symbol of—

Oren: I was going to tear my hair out at that point. If someone in the White House says this about the democratically elected leader of an allied country, what are other countries in the world going to think about the United States? If you are disparaging your democratic ally in this way, what does it mean for America’s security? Who’s going to trust you? And the last couple of days, we’ve been talking about some of the reactions to the book, I have been called basically a money-grubbing politician—a guy who’s out to sell books. I’ve been called a liar. I’ve been called someone who culturally stereotypes. I’ve been called a lot of things and I think that this is a pattern. Rather than engaging me on the very substantive issues that I’m raising, and that I’m raising in the most truthful way I can, sometimes at great cost to myself, the reaction is to sort of disparage.

Goldberg: Why do you think [U.S. Ambassador to Israel] Dan Shapiro got so upset with you? I mean, you guys were close.

Oren: I don’t even want to go there, you’d have to ask Dan that question.

Goldberg: Dan has made his public statements.

Oren: Dan called me a politician who wants to sell books, which I think is a part of the pattern. One of the observations I make in the book is that the administration is very disciplined. It’s one of the most disciplined administrations you’ll ever encounter, and the messaging is very consistent, unlike the Israeli messaging which is—

Goldberg: There is no messaging.

Oren: Exactly, it’s an oxymoron. Dan said that this is a time to calm things down, and that I threw a pail full of fuel on the fire. I’ve heard that five or six times from different sources. So that is the message. I’m pouring a pail of fuel on the fire. But if that lights up a fire that gets people to see clearly this Iranian agreement, which could endanger the lives of our children, then that’s fine. Then use any metaphor you want.

“American Jews have a very hard time understanding what it was to embark on the Oslo peace process and get a thousand Jews blown up, including my sister-in-law.”

Goldberg: So go to Iran for a minute. So I read your dialogue about the Iranian threat with [the Times of Israel editor] David Horovitz, who I love, and when I read it—and I acknowledge, I’m living in a safe place, not necessarily in range of whatever Iran might one day have—but I felt like I was reading two old Jews being hysterical at each other. It was like you were whipping yourselves up into a frenzy.

Oren: But David’s not like that. David’s very low key. I’m much more emotional than David is.

Goldberg: Anyway, it got me thinking: Are they just being hysterical, or am I just not feeling this impending sense of doom that you’re feeling?

Oren: I’m not a particularly apocalyptic person. I know some people who are, and we have some friends who are.

Goldberg: Well you live in a city that specializes in the apocalyptic thinking, obviously.

Oren: Read my apocalypse.

Goldberg: What?

Oren: It was a joke.

Goldberg: Oh. I get it.

Oren: It’s my next book, actually. Read My Apocalypse.

Look, I know too much about the Iranian nuclear program. Maybe I just know too much about history. I don’t subscribe to the lachrymose version of Jewish history. I don’t subscribe to it. It’s not part of my worldview. If I didn’t have a very bright worldview, I couldn’t do what I did, but the Iranian nuclear program presents not one but multiple existential threats to us, and of that I’m certain. And some things I actually can’t say, but what I would say is that Iran has begun a major upgrading campaign for its proxies in the region. They have 100,000 rockets. If those rockets become guided rockets, that would be the first conventional strategic threat we have faced since 1973. And you have to believe that they’re going to put a lot of that money they will get from this agreement into more upgrading.

Goldberg: Well, I had this conversation with the president a few weeks ago, and he said—

Oren: —That they can be anti-Semitic and rational.

Goldberg: —No, I’m referring to his cautious optimism that they will spend their windfall on domestic projects.

Oren: I saw what he said. They can serve as a rational regional actor; they can bring about some kind of reconciliation between Sunnis and Shiites. This goes against everything we talked about. I talked about the intimate discussions, and which I can’t go into, but what I can say is that they were frank, they were very good discussions, we looked at the same data, we reached pretty much the same conclusions. Where was the difference? The difference was in reading the nature of the Iranian regime.

Goldberg: Reading the motivation.

Oren: The nature, which is the essence of the regime. Are they rational or are they not rational? And understanding that irrational regimes can sometimes take rational steps. Here’s a good example of the fact that our margin for error on Iran is exactly zero. And what’s at stake here is not [Obama’s] legacy. It’s not who has got whose name on what.

Goldberg: Why are so many people I know and you know, from [former Israeli officials] Amos Yadlin to Meir Dagan to Yuval Diskin—why are they so much more sanguine about this than you or the prime minister?

Oren: They’re not.

Goldberg: They’re not?

Oren: The debate you heard in December 2012 was a deafening debate. I actually quote [former Israeli Foreign Minister] Avigdor Lieberman quoting The Good, the Bad and the Ugly—“If you’re going to talk, talk. If you’re going to shoot, shoot.” He quotes—it’s not Clint Eastwood, it’s the Jewish guy.

Goldberg: Eli Wallach?

Oren: Eli Wallach. He quotes Eli Wallach, and I agreed with that. But it was a very loud debate, a deafening debate in Israel about what America would do. That debate ended suddenly in September of 2013 over the Syrian chemical red line. It ended. It was amazing how that stopped. When Obama didn’t send a couple of Tomahawk missiles into Damascus, the debate in Israel ended, and I—

Goldberg: Because the Israelis realized that the U.S. is not going to ride to the rescue?

Oren: All of those people you named have been quiet since then.

Goldberg: They haven’t been that quiet. Amos Yadlin says that there’s ways that this deal can work for Israel.

Oren: I can’t speak for Amos. I’m just talking about as a matter of public debate, OK?

Goldberg: Was it a mistake for Israel not to use the military option [against Iran] somewhere between 2010 and 2012, when the Americans were worried that you were going to do something?

Oren: I don’t know. I don’t know. “I don’t subscribe to the lachrymose version of Jewish history, but the Iranian nuclear program presents not one but multiple existential threats to us.”

Goldberg: When Obama said to me, “As the president of the United States, I don’t bluff,” you think he was bluffing?

Oren: The Israeli public—

Goldberg: I’m asking you, not the Israeli public.

Oren: I’m not being diplomatic here. In the book, I talk about what I think were the triggers for a possible military strike, and even then I was a minority voice. I thought that Obama would use military force at certain points, but now he’s coming out and saying it wasn’t really much of an option.

Goldberg: Do you feel you’re a part of a modern-day Bergson Group now? [The Bergson Group was a World War II-era organization of Revisionist Zionists that campaigned for greater American Jewish militancy on behalf of European Jewry.]

Oren: Am I in the Bergson Group? That’s a great question. Only a few people would understand that.

Goldberg: Eight people in the world know what this means.

Oren: And one of the eight is [J Street Founder] Jeremy Ben-Ami.

Goldberg: Oh right, his father was in the Bergson Group.

Oren: Jonathan Rosen put it in a harder way. I almost cried last night, the way he put it.

Goldberg: What did he say?

Oren: You know the joke about the two Jews who are about to be executed by the SS?

Goldberg: One refused a blindfold and the other one says, “Don’t make trouble?”

Oren: Don’t make trouble. Rosen said, “Are you the Jew who is refusing to put on the blindfold?” It just hit me in the gut when he said that.

Goldberg: Iran wants you dead, and America is inadvertently helping it achieve that goal. Is that your bottom line?

Oren: The American impetus may be noble. Really.

Goldberg: Maybe this deal will stop [the Iranians] from getting a bomb.

Oren: The impetus may come from a good place, but the Israeli reading of it is that the outcome will not be good, and that is an understatement. Copyright © 2015 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All Rights Reserved. CDN powered by Edgecast Networks.

Opinion June 27, 2015

How Michael Oren Got Blasted by Inside-the-Beltway Noise Machine by David Hazony , Editor The Tower June 25, 2015

More than two years after moving back from Israel, I still feel like a newbie in weird Washington. Feel the air: so hot and humid that when it rains, it feels more like an ancient marsh rising up from the earth. Thirsty? There’s the innovative use of alcohol, at all times of day, as a replacement for caffeine. Now taste the food: Even the fancy restaurants serve up bland fat-and-carb fare that’s more wonk-fuel than cuisine.

There are special sounds, too. Listen closely, and you will hear the noise machine.

What is the noise machine? A big, organized collection of individuals & groups that actively promotes whatever policy the White House is pushing on a given day, creating the impression of public support — kind of like a sailboat tugging a huge electric fan, humming day and night, pushing the boat forward. Now, I know that every political party and corporation on earth has its own noise machine.

But no PR effort is as well funded and sophisticatedly spun as those of the great centers of executive political power. And with the possible exception of the Kremlin, none is as impressive as that of the White House, under any administration. Most people working for that noise machine are not on the payroll of the federal government. Many are paid by supporting organizations. Others volunteer. But you can tell who they are by their uncharacteristic fluidity of speech — it’s easier to rehearse arguments from a talking-points memo—& by the quickness of their outrage at seemingly trivial things.

Right now, the urgent efforts of the noise machine are promoting a historic nuclear deal with Iran. This makes sense: This is the signature policy effort of the past few years (Ben Rhodes called it “The ObamaCare of the second term”). The deadline is very soon, and it’s an obviously tough sell: Talks initiated with the stated aim of dismantling Iran’s nuclear weapons program have morphed into a deal that feels more like “Iran agrees to put off building its bomb until the next administration, and in exchange they get to keep their bomb-building capabilities, have sanctions removed, and implicitly legitimize their expansionism, their terror support, their ballistic missiles and their human rights abuses.” Bait, meet switch.

When somebody comes along who threatens to seriously harm the noise machine’s efforts at such a crucial moment, you can bet that the machine’s vast appalled galvanized chromium umbrage will focus on them. Like when the prime minister of Israel had the gall to accept a congressional invitation to give a speech that called for a different approach on the Iran deal than that of the administration.

Or this year, when Israel’s former ambassador to Washington, Michael Oren, releases a book telling of his time in Washington (“Ally: My Journey Across the American-Israeli Divide”) and does it just when the talks are coming to a head. In it we see an insider’s account of the dramatic change of America’s behind-the-scenes policy toward the Iranian regime, dating all the way back to the administration’s first year: from its tepid response to the democratic protests in 2009, to harsh warnings against an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, to actions that contradicted the official White House line that “all options are on the table” with Iran. Without ever slipping into hyperbole, the book’s measured narrative seems to confirm a lot of what the administration’s critics have been accusing it of: enabling the Iranian regime rather than really trying to stop it, while putting a vice grip on the increasingly alarmed Israelis.

Now, like about half the people writing about this book, I have known the author personally. I worked with him years ago, when we were both connected to the same research institute in Jerusalem, when I edited his occasional essays at the journal Azure. We have stayed in touch. We disagree on Israeli politics, and it’s safe to say that he’s no Likudnik. He is also a decent person, a meticulous historian and, as everybody knows by now, a masterful storyteller.

In his new book he tells an incredible story that has been largely drowned out by the noise machine. This has happened because he also does a few things that, from the White House’s perspective, hurt a lot. None of them are unreasonable for a professional historian who had a close-up view of history unfolding. None of them violate codes or red lines in journalism or public debate.

He analyzed not just the policies, but also the possible motives of President Obama against his biographical background. He gave his impressions of the uses of Jewish identity among people defending the White House.

In the interviews and columns leading up to the launch, he repeated these themes.

This is all pretty standard stuff, and probably wouldn’t have raised much of a storm if they had been published at a different time. Analyzing a leader’s motivations against the backdrop of his upbringing is no different from David Remnick of The New Yorker analyzing the motives of Benjamin Netanyahu in light of his own father. And risking accusations of stereotyping in order to hold a mirror to some American Jews may be uncomfortable, but it is legitimate: Many Israelis, like myself, react the same way when trying to understand some American Jews. Nobody seriously worried about our collective Jewish future should want to silence that perspective. Why, then, the freakout? The noise machine, that’s why.

Oren’s book fell into the noise machine like a clock into a clothes dryer. There is no other way to explain why, for example, the State Department felt that alongside its pretty busy schedule, it should send officials to attack the book — unless they are attacking it for the same reason that they Twitter-bombed a recent New York Times report about the amount of nuclear fuel the Iranians are stockpiling.

When faced with a serious threat to its messaging, the noise machine goes into action, like antibodies against a virus. But anyone without skin in the game can see that those involved are overreacting — just as they did when Netanyahu came to Washington, or when he said things he shouldn’t have said in the run-up to an election and then apologized. Politicians in every democracy run for office, say stupid things, walk them back, and everyone moves on when it’s over. I recall Obama saying a few stupid things when he ran for president as well.

Oren has been accused of being a politician. True — though the noise machine had no problem when the same politician spoke critically of Netanyahu’s Washington speech during the Israeli election campaign. He has also been accused of trying to boost book sales — which, last I heard, are how authors make a living. But none of this actually addresses the substance of the story he is telling, or justifies all those well-orchestrated displays of outrage.

That’s why David Rothkopf, editor of the FP Group, who despite knowing Oren for decades still finds some of his remarks “offensively wrong,” nonetheless argues that the reaction to the book has been “disproportionate” and that Oren’s “views demand to be published because they are a vital piece of evidence as to why the rift in the U.S.-Israel relationship has become what it is.”

The most important goal of a well-oiled noise machine, you see, is to change the subject. Instead of addressing the criticism, it makes the messenger into the story.

But sophisticated readers should be able to see through it.

The book, you will find, is an irreplaceable trove of insight into what will one day be seen as a momentous historical turn. And we will be forever grateful to Oren for having written it.

David Hazony is editor of The Tower Magazine & a contributing editor to the Forward.

Read more: http://forward.com/opinion/310818/how-michael-oren-got-blasted-by-the-washington-noise-machine/#ixzz3eIBzwtc0

4.Michael Oren, Profile in Courage by  David Bedein

Oren’s revelations were not cheap shots to promote his new book. They were evidence of his integrity. Published: Monday, June 22, 2015 12:18 PM

I have been a vocal critic of Michael Oren, recently elected to the Israeli Knesset. I did not view Michael Oren as a man of principle.

Well, I was proven to be wrong.

Attending at a speech that Oren gave last week, man of deep principle sat on the podium, speaking from the heart, speaking with pain about a subject that his body language told me that he really did not want to discuss, yet felt that he had to deliver. Oren could have acted according to the diplomatic codes that all emissaries live by – to maintain the protocol that you not report what you see and hear with your eyes and ears.
However, Michael Oren witnessed a US President turn his back on Israel and could not remain silent.

After all, how many people spend quality time with a sitting US President?

How many people witnessed Obama turn down the request of Jonathan Pollard to visit with his father on his death bed?

How many people witnessed the President of the United States refuse the request of Jonathan Pollard to attend his father’s funeral?

As Abbas joined forces with Hamas, Michael Oren witnessed the unkindest cut of all, the ultimate moral equivalence in American foreign policy, when Obama did not seem to care that any Palestinian state would work towards a “two stage” solution, not a “two state” solution.

Oren’s revelations were not cheap shots to promote his new book.

Michael Oren earned the enmity of the Israel military industrial complex tied to contracts with the US defense establishment, where the watchword is never to say a discouraging word about the highest power echelons of US-Israeli relations.

Michael Oren also earned the enmity of the American Jewish establishment, which, for 60 years, since the age of US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, has buckled under rather than asserted any real challenge to a sitting US President.

Same goes for the Israeli political establishment, where Michael Oren was denounced by leading politicians from both sides of the political spectrum in the Israeli Knesset Parliament. Now we know why Michael Oren was denied a position in the new Israeli government.

Yet there is a deeper reason for Michael Oren’s principled stand.

Although he renounced his US citizenship to become Israeli ambassador to Washington, Michael Oren is a devoted scholar of American history, and knows well that the fabric of America was woven by those who stood their ground for principle, no matter what price they would have to pay.

It was a young Senator John F. Kennedy who inspired a generation of Americans in the 1950’s and 1960’s when he penned Profiles in Courage, a book and film series which chronicled American politicians who spoke their conscience and paid for it with their careers.

Michael Oren has unwittingly written a new chapter in Profiles in Courage.

The picture of Michael Oren & President Obama is reminiscent of Mordecai’s

encouragement of Queen Esther, when he tells her, “Who knows if it is but for this that you have come into the palace of the King?”

David Bedein, is director of the Israel Resource News Agency & The Center for Near East Policy Research. His website is www.israelbehindthenews.com.

Michael Oren, Profile in Courage by David Bedein

6.Michael Oren is a Zionist, a patriotic American and a courageous fighter By Ted Belman

I fell in love with Michael Oren while reading the first paragraph of his much talked about book, Ally.

He tells the story of the influences in his life to which preceded being appointed Israel Ambassador to the USA. Born in 1955 on the east coast he experience antisemitic attacks which resulted in fist fights. Because his father fought in WWII in Europe, Michael was very early on indoctrinated by his father to fight for and defend the Jewish people. He was keenly aware of the Holocaust. He vividly recalls the fear just prior to the Six Day War and the elation just after the miraculous victory.
He had to fight for everything he attained. He was a poor athlete and poor scholar and struggled to transform himself into a varsity team rower and Ivy League student. His parents couldn’t afford to send him to expensive Jewish camps or schools so he had to learn his Zionism at home.

He went to Israel in two succeeding summers while in high school and worked on a kibbutz for no pay. Yet he had to finance his own trips to get there. A highlight of his young life occurred when he went with a Zionist youth group to Washington and met with the hero of the Six Day War, Yitzhak Rabin, the then Israel Ambassador to the USA. He recalls thinking that he wanted to be such an ambassador one day.

In 1977, Oren completed his undergraduate degree from Columbia College. He continued his studies at Columbia, receiving a Masters in International Affairs in 1978 from the School of International and Public Affairs, where he was an International Fellow and a DACOR Fellow.^[13]

After college, he spent a year as an adviser to the Israeli delegation to the United Nations.^[9]

In 1979, Oren emigrated to Israel.^[14] A few years later, Oren returned to the United States to continue his education, studying at Princeton University. In 1986, he earned an MA and a Ph.D. in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton.^[15]

After arriving in Israel he joined the IDF and became a paratrooper. He participated in the 1982 Lebanon War. He somehow failed to meet up with his battalion before it entered Lebanon so he crossed the border and made his way fighting with different units until he joined his own.

He was given a weekend pass which enable him to return to his sweetheart and marry her. The next day he was back at the front.

After the war he was sent to Russia to connect with the Russian refusniks which was a very dangerous assignment. He could easily have disappeared or ended up in the Gulag.

While studying in Princeton he was confronted with an anti-Israel narrative initiated by Edward Said. He did not shy away from making the case for Israel and eventually visited many campuses to spread the pro-Israel message.

Back in Israel he found it difficult to find work and make a living. Relief came after the peace treaty with Jordan was signed in 1984. Michael secured a job with the Rabin Government as Adviser on Inter religious affairs.

Subsequently, he endured the Second Lebanon War and the first and second intifada. His sister-in-law was killed by terrorists and his son was wounded in battle. His daughter also was involved in the Lebanese war as a nurse.

I know that many people disparage him for supporting Oslo and rejecting settlement construction. But there is no denying his commitment to Zionism and Israel.

I cannot begin to do justice to his story and urge you all to read the book.

Michael Oren is a Zionist, a patriotic American and a courageous fighter

13 Comments to Michael Oren is a Zionist, a patriotic American and a courageous fighter

13. rsklaroff says: June 27, 2015 at 7:46 pm BB satisfies your criteria.

7.Michael Oren: Criticism of Obama had to be made by Yoaz Hendel

Former Israeli envoy to Washington and current Knesset legislator accuses US president of adopting Arab narrative that Jews are in Israel because of the Holocaust; ‘The Cairo speech was twice as long as Obama’s inauguration speech. This is an indication of the importance he gives the Muslim world,’ he says.

The biggest debate among historians is where the story begins. Michael Oren is a Zionist historian. He writes from that point of view, he became an ambassador because of that point of view and it was that point of view that led him to Moshe Kahlon’s strange party Kulanu. His beginning is positive, at least in my opinion. The ending is reserved for others.

I met him when he was Israel’s ambassador to Washington and we became friends out of appreciation – at least on my behalf.

On one of the evenings I spent with him in Washington, we went to a formal Chabad dinner. We shared a table with Steny Hoyer, number 2 in the Democratic Party, and the Republican Chairman of the House of Representatives, John Boehner. They treated Oren like a rock star. When he went up to the podium to speak, the men fixed their ties and the women sat up straight. His image was that of an Israeli-American intellectual.

Michael Oren (Photo: Alex Kolomoisky)

When he left the job, we met in Israel from time to time. He continued impressing those around him. He turned into one of the most sought-out lecturers in the world, among the few in the Jewish world capable of fundraising millions.

Since his departure from Washington he wrote a book about his experiences. So did Hillary Rodham Clinton, Robert Gates and Leon Panetta, who all worked for President Obama and when they left, wrote critical books, aired out the dirty laundry. They sold books, got rich and built new careers. This is part of the political tradition in the United States, as well as in Israel.

Michael Oren was an Israeli ambassador, an academic who wrote a book, not one of Obama’s people. Joining politics happened by chance.

Related stories:

We spoke on the phone this week about the uproar over his new book. He has been going around the US, talking about the book and about Israel. Contrary to the initial impression created, this book is meant to serve political purposes, not to criticize President Obama. The American democracy is advanced enough to handle a book by an Israeli ambassador.

I asked him what was going on. Before the elections, he spoke to me about the need to strengthen the ties with the United States ahead of the Palestinian moves at the UN and at the ICC. To not poke the sleeping bear. Now, it appears, he stands on the opposite side.

“It’s an optical illusion,” he says. “The book discusses the question how can we improve and fix the relations. It is meant to encourage a discussion. There is also important criticism that had to be made. What did they expect, that I remain quiet and allow the issues that challenge us in our relations with the White House disappear? This is the truth. There is a moral issue here.”

You know better than me that telling the truth is problematic in diplomacy, I tell him. I can write whatever I want about Obama. His foreign policy is a fiasco. The deal with Iran is a result of despair. This is me and my opinions. The worst thing that could happen is it will be translated at the embassy and sent to the US. You live in a different reality: Until recently, you were an Israeli ambassador in the US, a familiar figure, now a member of Knesset in a coalition party.

Oren, left, with Kulanu party leader Moshe Kahlon and fellow party member Yoav Galant during the elections (Photo: Shaul Golan)

“Believe me, it would have been easier for me to release the book in November,” he says. “In the US, now is the worst time to release books. I insisted on releasing it before the deal with the Iranians is signed, in order to raise another debate in the US. To me it’s critical. I was accused of being greedy, a liar, a fantasizer. They’re trying to de-legitimize both me and the book. None of the critics bothered reading all 400 pages. They don’t want to deal with the problems.

“When he entered the Oval Office, Obama abandoned the understanding Israel and the US had since the 1980s on no surprises. When American presidents deal with the Middle East, they inform Israel. Pass on a draft, listen to comments even if they don’t always accept them. This is how it used to be. I remember sitting with a group of army officers at the Kirya in 2009, listening to Obama’s Cairo speech in disbelief. Surprised like everyone else. The fact Obama linked the State of Israel’s legitimization to the Holocaust in that speech was him adopting the Arab narrative: We’re here because of the Holocaust, not because of Jewish roots and 3,000 years of history. The change was so dramatic, and there we were in Israel not knowing it was coming. No one updated us. Only in November 2011 Obama went back to talking about the Jewish roots to the land of Israel. Only then did he recognize his error.”

I understand the diplomatic criticism, I tell him, but in the book you conduct a psychological analysis of Obama’s character and claim that he was affected by his Muslim father. This is a claim used by the Republican Tea Party, not historians and former ambassadors.

“I did this analysis before the Tea Party was formed,” he responds. “When you are an ambassador, you have to know what you are facing, who you are working with. This is your duty. When I tried to study Obama, I turned to what he wrote about himself. It was quite simple, Obama talks about his past a lot and quite honestly.

“I didn’t make anything up. In the book ‘Dreams from My Father,’ he describes his childhood and youth. He writes a lot about the connection to his father and his influence. It’s legitimate, in my opinion, to make a note of that. It’s hard to say that I’m an Islamophobe. I believe I’m the first ambassador to bring 80 imams into the embassy for Eid al-Fitr. This background is relevant to his policy. The Cairo speech was twice as long as his inauguration speech. This is an indication of the importance he gives the Muslim world.

“As a historian, I use the tools at my disposal. There were three major speeches made by leaders to the Muslim world. The first was Napoleon in 1798, then Wilhelm II when he visited the Othman Empire, and the third was American President Obama in 2009 in Cairo. You cannot not connect this to his worldview. Obama doesn’t consider the perpetrators of terror attacks ‘Extreme Islam.’ To him, they are outside the Muslim world, a different kind of enemy. The same applies to ISIS and al-Qaeda. You won’t find that term with him.”

Oren presenting his credentials to President Obama (Photo: Lawrence Jackson)

One of the articles Oren wrote for the Wall Street Journal is about the need for a diplomatic initiative. A two-state solution, with the knowledge there is no one to make peace with. To work around the Bar-Ilan speech and try to promote the Bush-Sharon road map from 2004. Building in the settlement blocs.

“This kind of initiative doesn’t interest the media in Israel,” Oren says. “They ignore these sections of the book.”

He is an Israeli patriot. The first section of the book is dedicated to the time he is most proud of: His Aliyah to Israel, his service as a lone soldier and officer in the Paratroopers, his reserve service during the First Lebanon War.

I’m trying to understand why the hell he chose to go to politics. Outside of politics, he fundraised for important causes, got a fortune for lectures, and no one attacked him. Now, he lectures for free and at the Knesset he needs to deal with those shouting louder than him.

“It’s all true,” he says. “But I couldn’t turn it down when I had the possibility. You know this. It’s not us who decide, for better or for worse. I’m hoping it’s for the better.”

8.Why Obama is wrong about Iran being ‘rational’ on nukes By MICHAEL OREN Los Angeles Times Op-Ed June 19, 2015

The Iranian supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, delivers a speech during a ceremony commemorating the 26th anniversary of the death of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in Tehran on June 4. (EPA)

Obama says Iranian leaders’ anti-Semitism doesn’t preclude a desire for survival. History shows he’s wrong

“The fact that you are anti-Semitic, or racist, doesn’t preclude you from being interested in survival,” President Obama said last month in an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg in the Atlantic. “The fact that the supreme leader is anti-Semitic doesn’t mean that this overrides all of his other considerations.”

The question of whether Iran, run by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and his ayatollahs, is a rational state goes to the very heart of the debate over its nuclear program and the negotiations, now nearing a June 30 deadline, to curb it.

Congress playing a risky game with Iran talks

Simply put: Those in the “rational” camp see a regime that wants to remain in power and achieve regional hegemony and will therefore cooperate, rather than languish under international sanctions that threaten to deny it both. The other side cannot accept that religious fanatics who deny the Holocaust, blame all evil on the Jews and pledge to annihilate the 6 million of them in Israel can be trusted with a nuclear program capable of producing the world’s most destructive weapon in a single year.

The rational/irrational dispute was ever-present in the intimate discussions between the United States and Israel on the Iranian nuclear issue during my term as Israel’s ambassador to Washington, from 2009 to the end of 2013. I took part in those talks and was impressed by their candor. Experts assessed the progress in Iran’s program: the growing number of centrifuges in its expanding underground facilities, the rising stockpile of enriched uranium that could be used in not one but several bombs, and the time that would be required for Iran to “break out” or “sneak out” from international inspectors and become a nuclear power.

What the Persian Gulf states want: Iran kept at bay

Both nations’ technical estimates on Iran largely dovetailed. Where the two sides differed was over the nature of the Islamic Republic. The Americans tended to see Iranian leaders as logical actors who understood that the world would never allow them to attain nuclear weapons and would penalize them mercilessly — even militarily — for any attempt to try.

By contrast, most Israelis viewed the ayatollahs as radical jihadists who claimed they took instructions from the Shiite “Hidden Imam,” tortured homosexuals and executed women accused of adultery, and strove to commit genocide against Jews. Israelis could not rule out the possibility that the Iranians would be willing to sacrifice half of their people as martyrs in a war intended to “wipe Israel off the map.”

The Americans tended to see Iranian leaders as logical actors… By contrast, most Israelis viewed the ayatollahs as radical jihadists.-

As famed Middle East scholar Bernard Lewis once observed, “Mutually assured destruction” for the Iranian regime “is not a deterrent — it’s an inducement.”

The gap between the American and Israeli assessment of Iranian sanity only widened over the years. Obama insisted that the ayatollahs analyzed the nuclear issue on a cost-benefit basis. “They have their worldview and they see their interests. They’re not North Korea,” he told Goldberg in a December interview.

Yet Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu saw Tehran’s rulers as medieval fanatics determined to exterminate the Jews and achieve world domination. “You don’t want a messianic apocalyptic cult controlling atomic bombs,” he warned Goldberg in a separate Atlantic interview in March. A nuclear-armed Iran, Netanyahu has frequently declared, is far worse than North Korea.

• Oren correctly points in his own words what an Ostrich Obama and his people are on the danger emanating from Iran. The number one terror promoting state with nuclear weapons in the world is a danger to the whole world. GARRISONCAT AT 12:18 PM JUNE 26, 2015

Which of them is right? Here’s the problem with Obama’s point of view: If indeed they are rational, Iranian leaders have had every reason to conclude that the president desperately wants a nuclear deal, and that their long-term cooperation is not really necessary.

Although the White House has repeatedly claimed that “the window for diplomacy will not remain open forever,” in fact it has never come close to shutting. Even now, without a deal in place, it seems obvious that the sanctions will start to unravel.

Consequently, the ayatollahs sensibly have determined that, by dragging out the negotiations, they can wrest further concessions from the United States. They can keep more centrifuges, more facilities and a larger uranium stockpile.

Critics of Iran deal are off-base

Why, logically, would Iran believe Obama’s claim that “all options were on the table”? On the contrary, Iran has remained the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism — brazenly threatening America’s allies in the Middle East, and in 2011 even allegedly planning a major terrorist attack in Washington against the Saudi ambassador — without facing military or even diplomatic retribution from the United States.

The Iranians have taken note of how the White House helped overthrow Libya’s Moammar Kadafi after he gave up his nuclear program but shied away from North Korea when it tested more weapons. Iran can see how Syrian dictator Bashar Assad, by ceding part of his chemical arsenal, went from being America’s problem to America’s solution, and then to barrel-bombing his countrymen with impunity. Iranian rulers understood they could count on obtaining their nuclear program’s objectives of regime survival and regional supremacy without dismantling a centrifuge.

Obama’s argument not only fails logic’s test but also history’s. Anti-Semitism, the president further explained to Goldberg in May, “doesn’t preclude you from being rational about the need to keep your economy afloat [or] being strategic about how you stay in power.”

Except, in one infamous example, it did. The Nazis pursued insane ends. Even during the last days of World War II, as the Allied armies liberated Europe, they diverted precious military resources to massacring Jews.

Obama would never say that anti-black racists are rational. And he would certainly not trust them with the means — however monitored — to reach their racist goals. That was the message Israeli officials and I conveyed in our discreet talks with the administration.

The response was not, to our mind, reasonable.

Michael Oren, a member of the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, is the author of “Ally: My Journal Across the American-Israeli Divide,” to be published June 23.

· 9.How Obama Opened His Heart to the ‘Muslim World’ BY MICHAEL OREN

And got it stomped on. Israel’s former ambassador to the United States on the president’s naiveté as peacemaker, blinders to terrorism, and alienation of allies.

Days after jihadi gunmen slaughtered 11 staffers of the Charlie Hebdo magazine and a policeman on January 7, hundreds of thousands of French people marched in solidarity against Islamic radicalism. Forty-four world leaders joined them, but not President Barack Obama. Neither did his attorney general at the time, Eric Holder, or Homeland Security Deputy Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, both of whom were in Paris that day. Other terrorists went on to murder four French Jews in a kosher market that they deliberately targeted. Yet Obama described the killers as “vicious zealots who … randomly shoot a bunch of folks in a deli.”

Pressed about the absence of a high-ranking American official at the Paris march, the White House responded by convening a long-delayed convention on “countering violent extremism.” And when reminded that one of the gunmen boasted that he intended to kill Jews, presidential Press Secretary Josh Earnest explained that the victims died “not because of who they were, but because of where they randomly happened to be.”

Obama’s boycotting of the memorial in Paris, like his refusal to acknowledge the identity of the perpetrators, the victims, or even the location of the market massacre, provides a broad window into his thinking on Islam and the Middle East. Simply put: The president could not participate in a protest against Muslim radicals whose motivations he sees as a distortion, rather than a radical interpretation, of Islam. And if there are no terrorists spurred by Islam, there can be no purposely selected Jewish shop or intended Jewish victims, only a deli and randomly present folks.

Understanding Obama’s worldview was crucial to my job as Israel’s ambassador to the United States. Right after entering office in June 2009, I devoted months to studying the new president, poring over his speeches, interviews, press releases, and memoirs, and meeting with many of his friends and supporters. The purpose of this self-taught course — Obama 101, I called it — was to get to the point where the president could no longer surprise me. And over the next four years I rarely was, especially on Muslim and Middle Eastern issues.

“To the Muslim world, we seek a new way forward based on mutual interest and mutual respect,” Obama declared in his first inaugural address. The underlying assumption was that America’s previous relations with Muslims were characterized by dissention and contempt. More significant, though, was the president’s use of the term “Muslim world,” a rough translation of the Arabic ummah. A concept developed by classical Islam, ummah refers to a community of believers that transcends borders, cultures, and nationalities. Obama not only believed that such a community existed but that he could address and accommodate it.

The novelty of this approach was surpassed only by Obama’s claim that he, personally, represented the bridge between this Muslim world and the West. Throughout the presidential campaign, he repeatedly referred to his Muslim family members, his earlier ties to Indonesia and the Muslim villages of Kenya, and his Arabic first and middle names. Surveys taken shortly after his election indicated that nearly a quarter of Americans thought their president was a Muslim.

This did not deter him from actively pursuing his bridging role. Reconciling with the Muslim world was the theme of the president’s first television interview — with Dubai’s Al Arabiya — and his first speech abroad. “The United States is not, and will never be, at war with Islam,” he told the Turkish Parliament in April 2009. “America’s relationship with the Muslim community … cannot, and will not, just be based upon opposition to terrorism.… We seek broader engagement based on mutual interest and mutual respect. We will convey our deep appreciation for the Islamic faith.” But the fullest exposition of Obama’s attitude toward Islam, and his personal role in assuaging its adherents, came three months later in Cairo.

Billed by the White House as “President Obama Speaks to the Muslim World,” the speech was delivered to a hall of carefully selected Egyptian students. But the message was not aimed at them or even at the people of Egypt, but rather at all Muslims. “America and Islam are not exclusive,” the president determined. “[They] share … common principles — principles of justice and progress, tolerance, and the dignity of all human beings.” With multiple quotes from the Quran — each enthusiastically applauded — the president praised Islam’s accomplishments and listed colonialism, the Cold War, and modernity among the reasons for friction between Muslims and the West.

“Violent extremists have exploited these tensions in a small but potent minority of Muslims,” he explained, in the only reference to the religious motivation of most terrorists. And he again cited his personal ties with Islam which, he said, “I have known Islam on three continents before coming to the region where it was first revealed.”

These pronouncements presaged what was, in fact, a profound recasting of U.S. policy. While reiterating America’s support for Israel’s security, Obama stridently criticized its settlement policy in the West Bank and endorsed the Palestinian claim to statehood. He also recognized Iran’s right to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes, upheld the principle of nonproliferation, and rejected former President George W. Bush’s policy of promoting American-style democracy in the Middle East.

“No single nation should pick and choose which nations hold nuclear weapons,” he said. “No system of government can or should be imposed upon one nation by any other.” In essence, Obama offered a new deal in which the United States would respect popularly chosen Muslim leaders who were authentically rooted in their traditions and willing to engage with the West.

The Cairo speech was revolutionary. In the past, Western leaders had addressed the followers of Islam — Napoleon in invading Egypt in 1798 and Kaiser Wilhelm II while visiting Damascus a century later — but never before had an American president. Indeed, no president had ever spoken to adherents of a world faith, whether Catholics or Buddhists, and in a city they traditionally venerated. More significantly, the Cairo speech, twice as long as his inaugural address, served as the foundational document of Obama’s policy toward Muslims.

Whenever Israeli leaders were perplexed by the administration’s decision to restore diplomatic ties with Syria — severed by Bush after the assassination of Lebanese president Rafik Hariri — or its early outreach to Libya and Iran, I would always refer them to that text. When policymakers back home failed to understand why Obama stood by Turkish strongman Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who imprisoned journalists and backed Islamic radicals, or Mohamed Morsi, a leading member of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and briefly its president, I would invariably say: “Go back to the speech.”

Erdogan and Morsi were both devout Muslims, democratically elected, and accepting of Obama’s outstretched hand. So, too, was Hassan Rouhani, who became Obama’s partner in seeking a negotiated settlement of the Iranian nuclear dispute.

How did the president arrive at his unique approach to Islam? The question became central to my research for Obama 101. One answer lies in the universities in which he studied and taught — Columbia, Harvard, and the University of Chicago — and where such ideas were long popular. Many of them could be traced to Orientalism, Edward Said’s scathing critique of Middle East studies, and subsequent articles in which he insisted that all scholars of the region be “genuinely engaged and sympathetic … to the Islamic world.” Published in 1978,Orientalism became the single most influential book in American humanities. As a visiting lecturer in the United States starting in the 1980s, I saw how Said’s work influenced not only Middle East studies but became a mainstay of syllabi for courses ranging from French colonial literature to Italian-African history.

The notion that Islam was a uniform, universal entity with which the West must peacefully engage became widespread on American campuses and eventually penetrated the policymaking community.

One of the primary texts in my Obama 101 course was the 2008 monograph, “Strategic Leadership: Framework for a 21st Century National Security Strategy,” written by foreign-relations experts, many of whom would soon hold senior positions in the new administration. While striving to place its relations with the Middle East on a new basis, the authors advised, America must seek “improved relations with more moderate elements of political Islam” and adapt “a narrative of pride in the achievements of Islam.”

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.

Yet, tragically perhaps, Obama — and his outreach to the Muslim world — would not be accepted. With the outbreak of the Arab Spring, the vision of a United States at peace with the Muslim Middle East was supplanted by a patchwork of policies — military intervention in Libya, aerial bombing in Iraq, indifference to Syria, and entanglement with Egypt. Drone strikes, many of them personally approved by the president, killed hundreds of terrorists, but also untold numbers of civilians. Indeed, the killing of a Muslim — Osama bin Laden — rather than reconciling with one, remains one of Obama’s most memorable achievements.

Diplomatically, too, Obama’s outreach to Muslims was largely rebuffed. During his term in office, support for America among the peoples of the Middle East — and especially among Turks and Palestinians — reached an all-time nadir.

Back in 2007, President Bush succeeded in convening Israeli and Arab leaders, together with the representatives of some 40 states, at the Annapolis peace conference.

In May 2015, Obama had difficulty convincing several Arab leaders to attend a Camp David summit on the Iranian issue. The president who pledged to bring Arabs and Israelis together ultimately did so not through peace, but out of their common anxiety over his support for the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and his determination to reach a nuclear accord with Iran.

Only Iran, in fact, still holds out the promise of sustaining Obama’s initial hopes for a fresh start with Muslims. “[I]f we were able to get Iran to operate in a responsible fashion,” he told the New Yorker, “you could see an equilibrium developing between [it and] Sunni … Gulf states.” The assumption that a nuclear deal with Iran will render it “a very successful regional power” capable of healing, rather than inflaming, historic schisms remained central to Obama’s thinking. That assumption was scarcely shared by Sunni Muslims, many of whom watched with deep concern at what they perceived as an emerging U.S.-Iranian alliance.

Six years after offering to “extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist,” President Obama has seen that hand repeatedly shunned by Muslims. His speeches no longer recall his Muslim family members, and only his detractors now mention his middle name. And yet, to a remarkable extent, his policies remain unchanged. He still argues forcibly for the right of Muslim women to wear — rather than refuse to wear — the veil and insists on calling “violent extremists” those who kill in Islam’s name. “All of us have a responsibility to refute the notion that groups like ISIL somehow represent Islam,” he declared in February, using an acronym for the Islamic State. The term “Muslim world” is still part of his vocabulary.

Historians will likely look back at Obama’s policy toward Islam with a combination of curiosity and incredulousness. While some may credit the president for his good intentions, others might fault him for being naïve and detached from a complex and increasingly lethal reality. For the Middle East continues to fracture and pose multiple threats to America and its allies. Even if he succeeds in concluding a nuclear deal with Iran, the expansion of the Islamic State and other jihadi movements will underscore the failure of Obama’s outreach to Muslims. The need to engage them — militarily, culturally, philanthropically, and even theologically — will meanwhile mount.

The president’s successor, whether Democrat or Republican, will have to grapple with that reality from the moment she or he enters the White House.

The first decision should be to recognize that those who kill in Islam’s name are not mere violent extremists but fanatics driven by a specific religion’s zeal. And their victims are anything but random.

10.GAIL SEZ: Michael Oren is probably speaking Truth while putting himself on the line. We should protect him while he is risking a lot to protect all of us. I may not agree with his political positions on how, what or whether to risk for peace with our neighbors. I certainly would come down very hard against surrendering any of our Land in Israel…which is our G-d given Right, Legal under International Law since San Remo in 1922 (never abrogated), by virtue of our blood, sweat & tears, & because it is good for the world to have a strong, sovereign Jewish Israel, stabilizing the volatile Middle East. But, aside from that ‘prime meridian’ value judgement that rules my life, I give him credit for being a brave Whistleblower. I’ve never been one to worry about making the ‘opposition’ mad. Standing up for what is right – our rights to our own LAND as the indigenous people of this land for more than 3000 years is always right. So, Right On! I don’t think Michael Oren is lonely but he does speak the truth – so let’s join him.

All the very best, Gail/Geula/Savta/Savta Raba x 2/Mom

(thanks to Yisrael Medad for the picture below)

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