Howard Epstein

HOWARD EPSTEIN: IMAGINE. PRESIDENTIAL GAFFES – NOTHING IF NOT INFORMATIVE

By Howard Epstein

Posted on October 4, 2016

HOWARD EPSTEIN: IMAGINE. PRESIDENTIAL GAFFES – NOTHING IF NOT INFORMATIVE

Especially for You for Rosh Hashanah – Shana Tova to All

You can say what you like about Obama, he has advanced the art of presidential kippah-wearing way beyond that of his Democratic soul-mate Clinton. Whilst the latter’s yarmulke was perched, like a cherry atop a perfectly-risen Pavlova, upon the seductive, silvery, Slick-Willy bouffant mane (looking and sounding considerably older that his 70 years ought to have betrayed), the incumbent POTUS (President of the United States) wore his with all the aplomb of one who had indeed been groomed long ago by Jews in Chicago (although to be fair to Obama’s inspiration, the “community organizer” Saul Alinsky, I am not suggesting that he wore one after his barmitzvah, if indeed he celebrated one). It was as though, for Obama, all those years of Chanukah parties in the White House, and attending sedarim (nothing to do with vote-garnering, you understand) were merely a preparation for his Big Kippah Moment on Mount Herzl, where he delivered a eulogy to the departed Israeli colossus, Shimon Peres, that was an object lesson for Prime Minister Netanyahu.

Indeed, so fine was Obama’s speech and so – well, to be polite – so just the opposite was Bibi’s, that Obama should have his transcript published in a print-run of one and delivered to Bibi with the cover: Eulogy Writing for Dummies. It could form the basis for a self-improvement course for Bibi entitled: How Not To Put Your Foot In Your Mouth, 101. As dignified and eloquent as Obama was, Bibi was – just an embarrassment. Are there no script-writers on his team anymore? Does he really need to be told that his personal references to the tragedy of his fallen-hero brother, Yoni (for whom the nation still grieves forty years after Entebbe, without the need of any prompting from the PM), are best internalised and not spoken? Twice! It was Shimon’s day, Bibi. Not Yoni’s. And not yours. Not everything is about you. And, please, Prime Minister, please, do not rush off to find a new script-writer. Friday was evidence enough that you are well past your best-by date. Just go home. The world’s statesmen, Presidents and Prime Ministers must have been relieved when you left the podium (I know I was). Now it is time to leave the political stage altogether.

But to return to the giants of the American political scene, and their gaffes, one benign the other crass, let us take first the latter. In what was almost certainly one of his least erudite oratorical references, Clinton, lauding the just-departed redoubtable Shimon Peres, invoked the long-since departed, but somewhat arcane for the occasion, John Lennon (of all people). Thus did the spirits of the greatest Israeli leaders interred on Mount Herzl find, passing amongst them, that of a cruelly-assassinated (to be sure), but otherwise, and in terms of wisdom, somewhat limited, John Lennon. “Imagine”, Clinton urged on us, referring to the sneering scouser by name, invoking the insight of the most famous pupil of Ravi Shankar. Odd at a Jewish funeral, to say the least.

But let us, indeed, imagine.

Imagine that the heroism of the fighters of the Yishuv, and those who joined them straight from the woebegone, leaking vessels – delayed several years as they were, on their journey from Holocaust Europe, by the British (as indeed, they had delayed Israel’s own emergence from the chrysalis of Palestine) – had been not quite enough to beat back the five invading Arab armies that had sought to snuff out not just the Jewish State but all Jewish life here in 1948.

Imagine that the UN had imposed a ceasefire and that the remnant of the Jews had been given, as a consolation prize, Judea and Samaria, while the “Palestinians” (a concept that did not find its expression for well over a further decade, but we shall let that pass, because we are imagining) got the rest, from Metullah to Eilat.

Imagine that the Arabs had created a vibrant, modern state and economy, had become a world-leader in dozens of fields, democratic and benign, with a health service that Americans would die for (as it were).

Imagine that the Jewish non-state on the West Bank, devoid of ideas and bankrupt in morals did no more than live off charitable hand-outs and plough them into weapons and bombs, which they deployed to rip through crowds of Arabs innocently going about their constructive daily business.

Imagine that, although the Arabs allowed the Jews to avail themselves of many benefits of their advanced economy and services (even treating the families of the leaders of the Jews in their hospitals, for which the Jews showed no gratitude), yet whenever an Arab luminary died – or child was killed – the Jews celebrated vociferously.

Can you imagine …..? No Well, try little harder.

Imagine next that a secret peace process had been started in a mythical place, let us call it Olso, and that, after it had been embarked upon, and begun to be put into effect by giving the Jews weapons and increasing amounts of autonomy, they, the Jews, launched a bombing campaign across Palestine blighting the lives of thousands of Arabs (having previously killed Palestinian athletes at an Olympic Games and having thrown Arab children out of second-floor school windows in the Galil, also).

Wait! Stop! My brain hurts, you cry. Too much imagining! Who would behave like that?

Well, who did?

All we have done is to hold up a mirror to our region, and have seen that it was a badly-formed, distorting mirror that makes every assertion ridiculous, because we know that Jews are constructive and not nihilistic, incapable of such wanton destruction. Indeed, we Jews love life and we leave it to others to love death – as they proudly proclaim.

So let’s stop imagining. And let’s leave Lennon and Clinton in their make-believe worlds. We have more real achievements to pursue in this not-quite-seventy year old country, whose peoples history is thousand years old, showing that Jews have a monopoly not on persecution but on longevity.

Now for the other presidential faux pas. As surely as Obama admitted that he truly was, as the cameras and global television plainly showed, in Jerusalem, Israel, on Friday last (with Israeli flags fluttering behind him) to deliver his “remarks” about Shimon Peres, the White House swung into remedial action by publishing a reworked version of the press release some hours later. To describe a device well-practised within the Washington Beltway, this was an attempted cover-up, but in plain view, and thus one that was so crass as to be a stain on the Obama White House forever. There it is, for posterity, in print:

Jerusalem, Israel

and note the care retrospectively taken to excise even the expectant comma. Where one wonders, did that leave the 3,000 year old city? Even the Obama White House did not have the temerity to place it in Palestine! What a futile, inchoate exercise, to seek to leave the world’s one real shining city on a hill (as Americans like to describe America) supposedly stateless, when everyone on planet earth knows beyond a doubt that it is rooted in Israel – where Obama first, correctly, put it.

(In the light of all that, consider the Ha’aretz website headline on Friday evening: At Peres’ Funeral, Obama, Bill Clinton Remind Netanyahu Not to Rewrite History. See http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-1.745331. A little rich, don’t you think?)

It is hard to (to coin a term) imagine anything more shameful than a real-life example of the work of George Orwell’s hero, Winston Smith – employed, in the 1984 eponymous novel, by a totalitarian state, to re-write history – being enacted over the dead body of Shimon Peres, before the earth had fully settled on his coffin. But that is the Obama White House for you, consistent in its junking of the truth, as in the banning of the term “Islamic terrorism” from such outrages as Fort Hood, San Bernardino and the Orlando gay club massacres. That all the shooters were Muslims, with radicalised and/or jihadi material all over their computer hard drives, is not sufficiently convincing for Obama. The fact that that few (if any) suicide bombers throughout the world have ever been Christian, Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist or Jewish, cuts no ice with Obama’s team, so there are Winston Smiths busily engaged, evidently as recently as this last weekend, within the Obama administration. (It is surprising that it took them a whole six hours to delete , Israel from the cover sheet of the transcript.) Well, where I come from, Barak, we call a spade a bloody shovel. It is a good rule too for the most powerful man in the world, whatever his antecedents.

So there we have it. One President (for once a POTUS always a POTUS) invokes a pop singer, whilst another says the right thing, only for his office to uncorrect it.

Yet there was more.

Far be it from me to take anything away from Shimon Peres (and I certainly wish to give no impression other than my deep respect and affection for the man, and what he represented in terms of the creation of the State of Miracles here) and his efforts in connection with of the Oslo peace process, whatever one thinks of it (and I for one adhere to the views of Professor Efraim Karsh – see:

http://besacenter.org/mideast-security-and-policy-studies/msps123-karsh-the-oslo-disaster/

in regarding it as a disaster) but the main reason why Oslo failed was that the Palestinians were thereby empowered to ensure that outcome.

Accordingly, whilst Obama laments that Oslo may have died with Peres, as others have previously blamed it on the death of Rabin, it is important to remember the way-stations to Lethe of the cortège of Oslo. From the Second Intifada, which killed off Shalom Achshav (Peace Now) as a popular and effective movement as surely as it destroyed the more than one thousand Israeli, including 119 children, who were murdered in it, to the rejection by Arafat of the (after the 1995 Rabin assassination) offer of peace by Ehud Barak at Camp David in July 2000 (for which Clinton squarely blamed Arafat), the Palestinians have never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity*.

Obama for his part, chooses to ignore the multiplicity of invitations to meet that Netanyahu has offered Abu Mazen, the nom de guerre of Abbas. (The very fact that these people have those noms at all tells you much about them – and their “Street”, whom they have steadfastly declined to prepare for peace with the Jews. I am waiting for the first Palestinian to declare his nom de paix, but I am not holding my breath).

So there we have it. Clinton (the USA’s semi-detached president, whose ignoring of seven Al-Qaeda wake-up calls facilitated 9/11, and who recklessly paved the way for the Credit Crunch by allowing the US banks to undertake investment, as well as banking, business) looking like he was up way past his bed-time; Bibi sounding like he is pontificating way beyond his best-by date; and Obama finally saying what he should have said before he kicked off the Arab Spring with his inflammatory words at Cairo university way back in the day, yet at last honestly attributing our right to be here to something less recent than the Holocaust. And Oslo disinterred momentarily again just as Peres was being interred.

Altogether, however, the event showcased Israel as a moderate, successful, modern, civilised nation, the burial of whose longest-serving luminary (openly-admitted now as the Father Of Its A-Bomb), drawing everyone from Prince Charles (the British monarch-in-waiting, with his personalised Prince of Wales yarmulke), to such of our “friends” as the most-failed-president-ever of France, Hollande (texting away furiously throughout the ceremony, doubtless some inspiration as to how to do for us at the UN in November), and getting on for a hundred other luminaries and dignitaries.

Obama to his further credit, also reminded the world of Israel’s achievements in the very many fields in which Peres was instrumental and of the benefits that Peres inspired for us and the whole of mankind. He spoke also of Peres’ journey from the shtetel, where later his recumbent family and their lantsmen were burned alive, and to death, in their synagogue by some entity he called “the Nazis” (now where was it that they came from? Mars perhaps?), to seventy years of public service, vision, optimism, modesty and greatness in … in – in wherever it is that Jerusalem is situated. A fitting tribute to a unique life and a fitting allegory for truth as opposed to cant.

* Attributed to Abba Eban after the Geneva Peace Conference of 1973 in relation to the Arabs – but close enough.

~~~~~

As usual, I have borrowed from my recently-published book for the allusions to America and its disappointing political leaders.

There is no need for me to tell you that the scourge of gun crime is perhaps the most pressing issue in the USA. My book takes a new approach – support failing gun control by approaching gun crime through the prism of gun culture.