June 3^rd

Mona Charen takes President Obama to task today (and what else is new?) for being inadequately repelled by anti-Semitism. She claims that, “With knee-jerk reliability Obama cannot permit any acknowledgment of the evils of other nations to pass without mentioning our own sins. ‘(There are deep strains of anti-Semitism in this country)’.” Mona says that, “This is an intellectual and moral failing on Obama’s part.” Of course Mona may not be familiar with the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus says first get the beam out of your own eye before you try to take the mote from your brother’s eye. Mona thinks it is a “moral failing” on the President’s part to be concerned about this instruction. That is a truly curious position to take.

So what is the anti-Semitism situation in this country and in Iran? We know about the Iranian government’s position on Israel and on the Holocaust; I’ll get to that later, but what about Jews in Iran? How are they faring? There are about twenty-five Synagogues in Iran and Iranian Jews are protected by a fatwah from Ayatollah Khomeini himself. Khomeini has made a clear distinction between, “Our Jews and the blood sucking Zionists in Israel.” Even so I’m sure that Iranian Jews must be a bit nervous.

In this country Jews are not faring as well as they seem to be in Iran. Ms. Charen thinks it is “immoral” to consider this but I’ll do it anyway. A Synagogue in Rutherford New Jersey was, a few years ago, firebombed for the fourth time. The current data on Synagogues are not available but until recently there have been 52 recorded attacks in this country since 2000, compared with none in Iran. How about that Mona? Mona cannot grasp the fact that Iran’s antipathy is as much about Israel and its treatment of the Palestinians as it is about Jews. Many European countries have a similar view of Israel but they are not as careful as is Iran to separate their view of Israel from their view of Jews and so in Europe there is no fatwah protecting Synagogues. Netanyahu suggests European Jews move to Israel; maybe they should move to Iran.

President Obama is trying to cool down the heat here and his efforts may not be successful. It seems prudent, at the very least, to stall for time. We do have an American war party. McCain and his, “bomb, bomb, bomb Iran,” Lindsey Graham and his other buddies with similar views provide a solution few Americans share with the possible exception of Sheldon Adelson and Mona Charen. For them, as for ISIS, the answer to any problem is to blow something up!