The Israeli intelligence website DebkaFile has reported that Obama is
now seriously considering an attack on the Iranian nuclear
facilities. His change of heart is not, according to Debka,
prompted by the Israeli Netanyahu — whose nation is most
directly threatened by Iranian nukes — but by an ultimatum from
King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, who told Obama that his nation
could not tolerate Iranian WMD, and would develop its own if Iran
was allowed to acquire them. In other words, Netanyahu’s threat
of a Middle Eastern conflict that could devastate Israel and
escalate to all-out nuclear war carried less weight with Obama
than the far less severe consequences threatened by the Saudis.
Nevertheless, their threat moved them to the head of the queue.
We know that Obama doesn’t want a nuclear weapons arms race, but
is he also afraid of offending the Islamic monarchs before whom
he dutifully genuflects?
It is, finally, all of a piece. Obama once promised an
even-handed approach to the Middle-Eastern conflict, but in
practice his seeming neutrality has barely disguised a decidedly
Pro-Arab and pro-Palestinian bias. Thus, without first taking
serious steps to check Palestinian terrorism, he has pushed for
the two-state solution that would inevitably lead to Hamastan,
and the conversion of the West Bank into yet another launching
pad for Katyusha missiles. In addition, Obama continually leans
on Israel to sign a nuclear non-proliferation treaty that would
cripple its major deterrent against an all-out attack by
surrounding Arab nations. Smelling blood, those neighbors, now
including the once-friendly Turkey, are becoming provocative and
their terrorist residents are agitating for war. Angry because
Israel would not stop building new housing for its growing
population in Jerusalem, Obama went out of his way to publicly
humiliate Netanyahu. He only relented and made nice when it
became evident that his Israel-bashing was going to cost him many
Jewish votes and much Jewish money.
Obama’s evident bias has been much noted and much
discussed. The rationalizers and explainers usually refer to the
influence of his radical base at a time when Israel has become
the Left’s Little Satan. Others have pointed to his long-term
associations with the noisily anti-Semitic Reverend Jeremiah
Wright, as well as with his fellow Chicagoans, Rashid Khalidi and
Ali Abunimah, both of them plausible academic propagandists for
the Palestinian cause.
As a psychodynamic psychologist my tendency is to look into
my research subject’s early associations, particularly with
parents and siblings, as well as with his current colleagues.
Perhaps clues to Obama’s notable Islamophilia can be found there.
This search into Obama’s past history uncovers my kind of
psychologists’s pay dirt. Thus, I am impressed to learn that
Obama’s Muslim father abandoned him and his mother to return to
Africa, when young Barack was barely out of diapers.
Nevertheless, in his heart Obama never abandoned his father. He
is sometimes critical of the mother who, as a single parent,
sacrificed to raise him, but not of the absent Obama Senior, to
whom he devoted the recent book, Dreams from My Father.
He sees his father as a rather tragic figure, of superior
intelligence and large ambitions who temporarily held a high
political office in Kenya, but who died a failure in his own
eyes.
A note of unrelinquished longing for the absent father runs
through the Dreams text, and is best summed up by a
photograph of Obama and his father, taken on the one occasion
when Senior Obama revisited his ex-wife and son in the States.
Little Barack, only waist-high to his begetter, smiles
rapturously at the camera as, with both hands, he presses his
father’s hand to his own breast. If a picture is worth a thousand
words, this one is worth a full doctoral dissertation. It tells
us of a passionate, unrelinquished but unrealized hunger for the
absent father that — judging from the recently published
Dreams — persists into the present.
Such data reveal a probable source of Obama’s Islamophilia.
My contention is that Barack still woos his Muslim father in the
persons of the Muslim rulers that share his bitterness, and that
he bows down to. He cannot ease his dead father’s sense of
failure, but he can alleviate the Muslim Daddy’s
crushing sense of inferiority towards the west and Israel. Thus,
he assigns his head of NASA, who should be planning all-out for
Mars, the major task of repairing the fragile self-esteem of the
Arab scientific community: they are to be assured of their major
contribution to our space program.
But this is token stuff. The Father’s real therapy calls
for an Islamic triumph over an ascendant Israel that has so often
humiliated its Arab neighbors. Obama will not give his Muslim
Daddies the destruction of the Third Temple; that would cost him
too dearly in votes, treasure, and historic reputation. But he
will give them if he can a castrated Israel, diminished to a
Jewish Vatican City or Tel-Aviv DOT COM. He would give them an
Israel guarded by resentful UN troops, an Israel without WMD,
Israeli Dhimmis existing on Islamic sufferance amidst a hostile
Arab majority.
Daddy would be so pleased.
