Obama Makes Telling Move, Won't Pick a Side in Israel Conflict: 'Nobody's Hands Are Clean'
As a case for moral bankruptcy, it was airtight.
When former President Barack Obama decided to weigh in on Israel’s war against the terrorist group Hamas, the man who established a record of appeasement for global terrorism proved he hasn’t changed a bit.
And he proved once again why he never should have been in the Oval Office in the first place.
A portion of Obama’s interview on the “Pod Save America” podcast was posted on Saturday — four weeks to the day after Hamas unleashed a massacre on southern Israel that left more than 1,400 dead and more than 200 hostages in hostile hands.
For most Americans, the military assault the Israel Defense Forces have launched against Hamas in the terrorist haven of Gaza is more than justified by the blood of murdered civilians and raped women.
For Obama, though, it’s a hand-wringing situation, summed up in four words of damning condescension:
“Nobody’s hands are clean.”
President @BarackObama on the violence in Gaza.
Full interview out Tuesday. pic.twitter.com/U42Jy2Aa4y
— Pod Save America (@PodSaveAmerica) November 4, 2023
“If there’s any chance of us being able to act, constructively to do something, it will require an admission of complexity,” Obama said, with the preening, professorial air that liberals swoon over but makes the teeth grate for sane individuals.
“And maintaining what on the surface may seem contradictory ideas: That what Hamas did was horrific, and there’s no justification for it. And what is also true is that the occupation and what’s happening to Palestinians is unbearable.”
While acknowledging a history of the “madness of anti-Semitism,” Obama said, “there are people right now who are dying who have nothing to do with what Hamas did.”
“If you want to solve the problem, then you have to take in the whole truth,” he said. “And you then have to admit, nobody’s hands are clean, that all of us are complicit to some degree.”
First of all, exactly what “occupation” is Obama talking about? Israel pulled out of Gaza in 2005, leaving its governance in the hands of the Palestinian people, who promptly chose a tyrannical terrorist group in Hamas as their government. (Since Islamists don’t exactly do democracy, the 2006 election that installed Hamas is an exercise that hasn’t been repeated since.)
Second, there are people dying in Gaza right now who might have “had nothing to do” with the Oct. 7 attack, but their deaths are as much a part Hamas’ plans as those of the Israeli young people murdered at a music festival. The terrorist group makes a practice of headquartering itself among civilians, hiding behind human shields of its own population and relying on Israeli reluctance to kill the innocent. (Don’t expect to hear Obama or any other leftists mentioning that stomach-turning cowardice.)
More to the point of Obama’s statement, though, as an example of the painfully obvious, it was unparalleled. In a world full of imperfect humans, it’s blindingly true that nobody’s hands are clean. It’s also blindingly true that some hands are stained red with the blood of innocent victims.
And moral men understand that sometimes, something needs to be done about that.
That’s not an argument that’s going to be coming from Barack Obama. He was a president dedicated to pursuing a ruinous nuclear deal with Iran, the globe’s most powerful state sponsor of terrorism and a fanatical enemy of both the United States and Israel. (The deal was torpedoed in 2018 when then-President Donald Trump had the sense to walk away from it.)
The fact that Iran is a top source of funding for the Hamas killers — and therefore complicit in the Oct. 7 carnage — doesn’t appear to have occurred to him.
But his open hostility to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was also in office for Obama’s second term and an outspoken opponent of the nuclear deal, clearly hasn’t budged.
Social media criticism surged:
Obama says Israel is engaging in “OCCUPATION” Of Palestinian land.
Then makes a moral equivalency between the State of Israel and Hamas.
Hard to quantify how radical and extremist this world view is coming from a former President who funded Iranpic.twitter.com/cXwT8WBUcC
— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) November 5, 2023
I do believe he is more responsible for this than anyone. His policies have created the instability over there.
— Tom (@Tom88206311) November 6, 2023
Obama says “All of us are complicit to some degree in occupied Hamas terror”
Yeah ok but who did the Iran Nuke deal 8 yrs ago?!🤔
Israeli PM Netanyahu eight yrs ago speech to Congress. pic.twitter.com/48Xvxp7dgT— Kat™ The Hammer ⚒️ (@KatTheHammer1) November 5, 2023
He was the worst president ever, before Biden came to be. I lived through the Carter years, the latter 2 take the prize of worst from Carter hands down!!!
— L R. Gaines (@LRGaines5150) November 5, 2023
What makes Obama’s statement particularly telling is that Obama remains the de facto leader of the Democratic Party.
President Joe Biden might be the man in the White House, but when it comes to real political pull — especially in the leftier fringes — Obama’s is the voice that counts. There’s a reason his wife is still talked about as a potential presidential contender.
And if Obama is saying this now, it’s a good bet it won’t be long until the country is hearing it from other Democrats — some of them who are still in office.
Obama and his fanboys on the progressive left and in the establishment media might call Obama’s pronouncements “nuance,” the kind of take a morally superior being might have on a situation that seems so murky to the rest of us mere mortals, but the opposite is actually true.
The world can debate the Israeli-Palestinian question going back to before the Balfour Declaration, but that doesn’t change the reality Israelis are living now — faced with a murderous enemy, literally on their border, who makes no bones about aiming to exterminate the Jewish state — and the Jews along with it.
No people on earth should be asked to make an accommodation with their would-be murderer, and no moral human would even suggest it.
Yet Barack Obama, whose pursuit of a nuclear deal with Tehran arguably played a key role in making Iran the malevolent power it is in the world today and who spent eight years undermining the United States’ friendship with its closest ally in the Middle East, has gone public with a statement all but declaring that Israel bears part of the blame for the slaughter of its own people.
As a case for moral bankruptcy, it was airtight.
And Barack Obama proved once again that a man with his blinkered moral vision, and his perverse political agenda, should never have been president in the first place.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
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