At a meeting between President Barack Obama and American-Jewish leaders this week, one of the participants said that the president “didn’t dismiss” Iran’s genocidal threats against Israel, but also that “he just didn’t really address it,” Lee Smith reported Thursday for Tablet.
“It was one of the tensest meetings I can ever remember,” said one participant who has been invited to many White House sit-downs over the years and requested anonymity. “The president spoke for 25 minutes, without notes,” he told me. “It was very impressive. Some people said very nice things, others expressed concerns, and talked about the role of Congress, and he talked about presidential prerogative, and cited other precedents for it. Lots of people challenged him very strongly, like about taking the threats of dictators seriously when Khamenei says death to America, death to Israel, death to the Jews. The president said he knows what the regime is, which is why he is trying to take away their weapons. He didn’t dismiss what the Iranians say, he just didn’t really address it.”
Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean and founder of the Simon Wiesenthal center, who also attended the meeting, was willing to speak on the record to Tablet. “Speaking for myself,” said Hier, “I was not satisfied.” Hier declined to describe the president’s comments but told me the point he made in the meeting. “Mr. President,” he said, “in a few weeks, you and others will be going to Germany to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camps. What meaning does that have when while negotiating over the nuclear treaty with Iran, none of the six powers said a word when the ayatollah Tweeted about annihilating the state of Israel, or a leading general in the IRGC said this is the regime’s raison d’etre? What meaning does the 70th anniversary have? Hitler said he was going to murder all the Jews in a letter from 1919, and he wound up doing it. If you hear the ayatollah saying that, every world leader should repudiate it immediately.”
Smith picked up on the disquiet of his interlocutors and observed:
The problem, however, is that the administration is not striking a deal with Iranian moderates or the good people of Iran who we are frequently told love America and have no issue with Israel, in spite of the massive “Death to America, Death to Israel” rallies. Rather, the White House is coming to an accommodation with a sick regime.
By doing so, Smith said, “the White House is providing billions in sanctions relief, and partnering with the regime in Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon while providing it with a pathway toward attaining a nuclear bomb, it is effectively rewarding Iran for its behavior and its rhetoric.”
Smith added that the damage goes beyond enabling Iran to spread its influence and destabilize the Middle East. It has implications at home too, as “[t]he cost to American political life of legitimizing exterminationist anti-Semitism may turn out to be one of the worst parts of a bad deal.”
Hier’s comments echoed those made by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu Wednesday night. In a speech commemorating Holocaust Remembrance Day, Netanyahu said, ““The bad deal that is being worked out with Iran shows that the historical lesson was not internalized. While the civilized world sinks into a coma on a bed of illusions, Iran’s rulers encourage subversion and terrorism, they spread destruction and death. The world powers shut their eyes to the masses in Tehran calling ‘death to America, death to Israel’.”
[Photo: The White House / YouTube ]