Obama's Iran Policy Fractures Jewish Community

Caught between their persistent loyalty to President Barack Obama and the threat the Iran deal poses to Israel, American Jews are forming a political chasm as wide as the San Andreas fault. Momentarily, it seemed as if a miracle had occurred. The mainstream American Jewish organizations had found a rarely seen common purpose as they mobilized in lockstep to block the Iran deal in Congress.

In Israel, the factions in the Knesset, which could not agree on the time the Sabbath starts, all agreed that the Iran deal was a cataclysmic betrayal and an existential threat. Even leftist Israeli intellectual Ari Shavit, an uninhibited critic of his government’s policies, called the deal outrageous and shocking.

In America, of course, there were the outliers. George Soros’ sponsored J Street published Obama’s talking points as its own. The National Jewish Democratic Council, another Obama mouthpiece, chastised mainstream Jewish organizations for making the deal a so-called “wedge issue” and subsequently came out in strong support for it.

[sharequote align="center"]Jewish Democrat leaders will do as they did during the Holocaust, chose party over people.[/sharequote]

No doubt, NJDC members in Congress will vote for the deal because to vote for the deal is to vote for Obama and the party. Given a choice between Jewish survival and loyalty to the Democrat party, Jewish Democrat leaders will do as they did during the Holocaust years, chose their party over their people.

For America, the deal itself was nothing short of contemptuous.

The Iran deal realigns America with Iran against even America’s traditional Arab allies in the region. It will release funds that will enable Iran to subsidize more terrorism and will make the region even more unstable while threatening the Sunni Arab states of the Gulf.

On the home front, it advances Obama’s agenda of an imperial presidency by stripping the Senate of its power to confirm treaties, and puts the treaty, now fictionally characterized as a deal, into his own veto-wielding hands. And if the Congress itself thought it might block the deal, Obama out flanked Congress by first sending the deal to the United Nations, where there is momentum to end the sanctions. This, in effect, will blunt any congressional action.

With the Iran deal, Obama has managed to create the greatest prospect for a Holocaust since Adolf Hitler convened the Wannsee conference to find a “final solution” to the Jewish question.

(Photo: AP)

While the mainstream Jewish organizations have finally discovered who and what Obama really is, the American Jewish public, which overwhelmingly voted for Obama not once but twice, refuses to give up the ghost and follow in the footsteps of their community leaders.

As the mainstream American Jewish organizations move to block Obama, a full 49 percent of the Jewish public supports the absurd agreement with Iran, knowing full well the existential implications for the Jewish state. In fact, those who have no opinion on the agreement, when pushed for an answer, are more likely to support it than not. Ironically, the American public largely condemns the deal.

How does one explain this absurd response of American Jews?

Psychologists would see this as a classic case of cognitive dissonance, the possession of positive attitudes toward two things that are incongruent with one another. American Jews have positive attitudes toward Israel and toward Obama, yet the Iranian deal--among other things--indicates that there is a negative relationship between Obama and Israel.

Psychologists claim that the tension caused by this inconsistency needs resolution. The easiest means to resolution is to distort the relationship between Obama and Israel by seeing the treaty as being positive for Israel despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Psychological dissonance seeks congruity, even if the resolution is one of self-deception, even self-delusion.

Consequently, even as the mainstream Jewish organizations mobilize against the agreement, the Jewish populous is stuck in the quagmire of its prior psychological support for Obama, just as a previous generation continually refused to acknowledge that the administration of President Franklin Roosevelt abandoned the Jews to the tender mercies of theNazis.

So, will the chasm between the mainstream Jewish organizations and the Jewish populous continue to widen over the deal? Most likely not.

An inescapable distortion that reduces dissonance is a temporary phenomenon. Inevitably, living with distortion creates its own tensions. At some point, the Jewish community will recognize that Obama has betrayed them just as he has betrayed America. Most likely by then undoing the widespread damage Obama has done with this agreement will be exceedingly difficult if not possible.

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