JTA on the “Obama-Cairo-Holocaust Lie”

Martine Kaplan — July 28, 2009 – 2:50 pm | Israel | Obama Comments (0) Add a comment

Ron Kampeas of JTA wrote a great response to an op-ed by Haaretz editor Aluf Benn that appeared in yesterday’s New York Times about President Obama and Israel. In his piece, Benn stated:

Mr. Obama seems to have confused American Jews with Israelis. We are close emotionally and politically, but we are different. We speak Hebrew and not English, we live in the Middle East and have separate historical narratives. Mr. Obama’s stop at Buchenwald and his strong rejection of Holocaust denial, immediately after his Cairo speech, appealed to American Jews but fell flat in Israel. Here we are taught that Zionist determination and struggle — not guilt over the Holocaust — brought Jews a homeland. Mr. Obama’s speech, which linked Israel’s existence to the Jewish tragedy, infuriated many Israelis who sensed its closeness to the narrative of enemies like Mahmoud Ahmedinejad.

Kampeas’s reaction addresses both Obama’s words and his intention with his speech in Cairo last month. First, he says, “Nowhere does he [Obama] say, he has not ever said, ‘And the sole underpinning of this bond is the Holocaust.’ Nowhere does he say, he has not ever said, ‘And because of this bond, Israel exists.’” Kampeas continues, “Obama’s speech in Cairo was about smashing myths, and one of these was Arab Holocaust denial. This is why the Holocaust featured prominently in his speech. This is why he emphasized Jewish suffering in accounting for America’s bond with Israel, while citing culture and history too.”

Kampeas also attacks Benn’s reasons for challenging Obama’s mention of Israel’s founding, saying:

So it can’t be that Benn and others are asking Obama never to cite Jewish tragedy. The only concusion that one can draw, then, from this jag about Obama’s Cairo speech is that every time Obama mentions Israel he must make clear he has a holistic understanding of its founding.

There’s a word for this: Narcissism. More than one word: Pathological narcissism. Monomania works too.

This is the third time in the last week that Kampeas has responded to such claims. Click here and here to read his other articles on the topic.

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