Paul J. Balles considers the implications of the appointment by US President-elect Barack Obama of an Israeli, Rahm Emanuel – a Zionist, pro-war Israel lobbyist – as White House chief of staff.
Much of the world has been rejoicing over the election of Barack Obama as the next president of the United States. The fact that Obama has overcome more than 200 years of slavery morphing into bigotry is worth celebrating. Obama has realized Martin Luther King’s dream.
We can only be hopeful that the president-elect will be neither too naive nor too clever to perform at least 50 per cent better than his predecessor, who winds down eight of the worst presidential years in history with a popularity rating of 26 per cent.
As might be expected, the liberal media praised both Obama and his public, and the conservatives began looking for faults. It didn’t take long for the Rupert Murdoch crowd at Fox News to pick up the story of how Obama chose an Israeli/American as his chief of staff.
But, for the liberals, listen to the enthusiastic celebratory voices coming from the op ed columnists for the New York Times:
Gail Collins bubbles with enthusiasm when she writes, "Today, you can bask in the realization that there are billions of people around the planet who loathed our country last week but are now in awe of its capacity to rise above historic fears."
What are those billions going to think when they discover that an Israeli (according to Haaretz) has been chosen as Obama's chief of staff, one of the most important and powerful positions in the administration?
Maureen Dowd happily gloats, "Some people said that a President Obama would make the White House the Black House. The opposite is true: Barack Obama has the chance to make the White House pristine again."
How pristine is it when slating Emanuel for chief of staff cancels the message from Barack Obama that the Iraq war was something we shouldn’t have fought in the first place. Emanuel plugged vigorously for the Iraq war.
Nicholas Kristof seems to believe that the country will be led by a president who won't pander to the wealthy. He's quoted as saying, "Barack Obama’s election may be a political milestone, ending an era in which Republicans succeeded at winning votes from the working poor to cut taxes for billionaires."
Emanuel is only a millionaire who made his wealth in the same way that the billionaires did. Emanuel went into investment banking, reportedly earning 18 million US dollars in just over two years at Wasserstein Perella & Co and Dresdner Kleinwort.
Roger Cohen seems to think of Obama as "perfecting the union", and writes, "Barack Obama’s idea, put simply, was that America can be better than it has been. It can embody once more what the world still craves from the American idea: hope."
What hope can a clear-headed observer have faced with an Obama chief of staff whose father was a member of the Israeli terrorist group Irgun and who, himself, briefly joined the Israeli Defence Force in 1991?
Matt Mendelsohn found only a few to photograph at the Lincoln Memorial on the night of the election, and writes, "The crowd standing in the shadow of Lincoln had the scoop, a profound event to themselves, of the people and by the people."
Why was “for the people” omitted from Lincoln’s “...of the people, by the people, for the people...?” For which people? Israelis?
Colson Whitehead, a skinny black guy writing about a skinny black guy, told the New York Times: "A lot of bigots woke up yesterday to the reality of our modern world.”
Wait until all of us wake up to the reality of tomorrow’s world, with Emanuel steering the helmsman!
Paul J. Balles is a retired American university professor and freelance writer who has lived in the Middle East for many years. For more information, see http://www.pballes.com.
