Obama, Let My People Go
By Daniel Greenfield
SultanKnish.Blogspot.com
3,000 years after the Jewish people left Egyptian
slavery bound for the land of Israel, their freedom
remains as elusive as ever. A new Pharaoh adjacent
not to the Nile, but the Potomac, looks out from the
White House and issues his decrees regarding the
Jews.
No sooner does a Jew build a house in Jerusalem,
than one of the Pharaoh's flunkies rushes to condemn
him for it. A week before Passover, one of those
flunkies announced that the administration was both
"deeply concerned" and "very worried" about new
Jewish homes in Jerusalem. A day later Jewish
families hoping to be able to live in their own holy
city were greeted with the announcement that
approval for more housing had been suspended to
avoid offending the little man with the big ears in
the White House.
The Obama Administration has spent more time
condemning housing in Jerusalem, than genocide in
the Sudan. If some parts of Israel are constantly
being shelled by terrorists, the Gilo neighborhood
of Jerusalem is constantly being shelled by
administration spokesmen. Year after year, the
people of an overcrowded city are frustrated in
their efforts to find a place to live, when some
White House or State Department flunky finishes
sipping his coffee, gets up in front of a microphone
and expresses the grave concern of his master that a
new condominium might go up in a place where Jews
had been living long before the religion of Obama's
grandmother was even a twinkle in her mad prophet's
eye.
Building permits in Jerusalem now undergo a perverse
kind of astrology. Approvals for every stage of the
process must happen at a time when no administration
official is visiting Jerusalem, and no Israeli
official is visiting the US. When Biden visited
Jerusalem at the same time that a municipal housing
approval came through-- the
administration staged a convulsive spectacle.
Biden threw a fit and stood up Netanyahu, Hillary
Clinton shrilled that the housing approvals "were
not only an insult to Biden, but an insult to the
United States" and then spent 43 minutes
berating the prime minister over the phone over what
would have been a minor municipal issue in her own
country. "There was an affront, it was an insult",
chimed in David Axelrod. A hundred media outlets
took up the theme. The theme being that the Jews had
gotten so arrogant that they were approving
construction in their own city at the same time that
a politician who had three times endorsed Jerusalem
as the undivided capital had stopped by for a
visit.
Pharaoh was determined to prevent the Jewish people
from going off to build their own country. And now
Obama is determined that Jews should not build in
their own city. There is a vicious irony in the
administration applying such repression before
Passover, a holiday of free men and women taken out
of the bonds of Egypt against the will of its
tyrant. A reminder that the millions of Jews who cry
out, "Next Year in Jerusalem" are reminded that a
new tyrant bars their way.
In his Passover message, Obama cited the
Islamist revolts in the Muslim world as embodying
the message of the holiday. Applying the message of
a holiday in which the Jewish people were liberated
from Egypt-- to celebrate rise of the Muslim
Brotherhood in Egypt, which seeks to wipe out the
Jewish people, is willfully perverse. The Bible says
of Pharaoh that he rose as a new King who did not
know Joseph. Obama clearly does not know Joseph, but
he is quite familiar with Mohammed.
When
Obama visited Egypt, souvenirs were sold of him
in Pharaonic garb calling him "The New Tutankhamen",
after the Pharaoh who falsely pretended to be of a
religion that he was not in order to revert its
monotheism to polytheism. Obama has credited his
Cairo speech with the Egyptian revolution. Seen in
that light his Passover message is the ultimate act
of egocentrism, crediting himself as the ultimate
embodiment of Passover. There is something of the
Pharaoh looking out upon the Nile in such
self-adoration.
From the Muslim Brotherhood to the Palestinian
Authority-- the
new slaughter of Jewish infants is backed by the
authority of the United States government. And a new
generation of Jewish overseers, from organizations
such as J-Street, compels obedience to the man whose
government is pushing hard for the creation of a
genocidal Palestinian state.
It is not hard to hear the mad echoes of that
ancient Pharaoh conspiring with his courtiers,
issuing press releases on the projected benefits of
his Slavery 2300 initiative, and berating his Jewish
overseers for not pushing their brethren hard
enough. And as with all master-slave relations it is
hard to know whom to be more disgusted by. The
Pharaoh whose ego outshines all other considerations
or the slaves who bow under the lash of his wrath.
The cyclical nature of history is both our blessing
and our curse. It allows us to learn from the past,
which torments us by its repetition. The Pharaohs
come and go. Blazing stars of ego that crash against
the heavens and fall back as cinders to fertilize
the soil of history. As do their followers. The
lessons go more unlearned, than learned. And so the
wheel turns again. Like a puppet in a Punch and Judy
show, Pharaoh rises and postures, shakes a tiny fist
at the heavens, and proclaims his supremacy. The
lesson that follows is not for his benefit, but for
ours. The egomaniac never learns any better. Nor do
the blank hordes who enlist in his cult of
personality. It is the people who know better but
remain silent who must learn.
No one who reads the Bible can help but measure when
the conduct of the pharaohs topple from cruelty into
madness. When self-interest turns to
self-destruction. The enslavement of the Jews begins
as a means to an end, the glorification of the reign
of the ruler, and ends as an goal in and of itself
that destroys all the ends it was meant to serve.
This is how tyranny always ends, its execution
destroying its justifications. The economic programs
of Nazism and Communism still ended in poverty and
ruin, no matter how many rivers of blood they
spilled. Evil destroys itself, but first it destroys
a great deal else.
In his final lecture before fleeing the Soviet
Union, Rabbi Moshe Feinstein warned that the exile
of the spirit is worse than the slavery of the
flesh. It is the first exile and the final exile.
Before the body is enslaved, the spirit is enslaved.
And even after the body is free, the spirit still
goes on in chains.
That is why the physical slavery of the Jews in
Egypt fell far short of the 400 years that had been
foretold to Abraham. For the slavery of the spirit
precedes and endures past the actual slavery. Even
when they were prosperous citizens of Egypt before
the chains fell on them and after when they marched
out highhandedly as a liberated people-- the
shackles had not fallen from their spirit. They were
free by law, but slavery had crept into their souls.
The message of that final climactic night, to
slaughter a sheep and paint its blood upon their
doorposts was a declaration of freedom, to kill the
sheep within. The herd animal that longed for
slavery and that even in the desert turned its eyes
back to the place of its servitude.The Jews had come
to Egypt as shepherds, but Egypt had turned them
into sheep.
The liberation began when Moshe and Aaron stood
before Pharaoh and dared to say to him, what none
had dared to say before. Let My People Go. With
those words the end had come. Not with mere force
but by establishing a superior moral authority to
that of the tyrant. It is easy to be a slave, when
you have no higher principle than the authority of
the system. And to be free, you must find a higher
principle than that authority or you will be forever
a slave.
Few tyrants rule solely by force. Their authority
derives from their insistence that they represent
the common good. To challenge them is to undermine
the common good. Their way is the way of peace. The
way of the Peace Process, which has converted Israel
from a strong and secure nation, to a divided nation
pierced by a genocidal enemy state inside its
territory. It is in everyone's best interests to
follow the will of the tyrant. To oppose him is to
disrupt the harmony. Building homes in Jerusalem is
disruptive. It is not peaceful. Why? Because that is
what the tyrant says. And to accede to that is to
accept the moral authority of his rule.
"Let My People Go", redefined the men and women who
had been Pharaoh's slaves as "Ami", the People of
G-d. Not slaves of a tyrant, but a people and a
nation whose only allegiance was to their Creator.
To say to a tyrant, "Let My People Go" is to deny
his physical and moral authority. His right to
dispose of their lives as he sees fit. It begins the
process of breaking the chains of the flesh, by
breaking the chains of the spirit that binds a
people to slavery.
Obama, Let My People Go. Let them go live in
Jerusalem and throughout their land. Take away your
chains and your pyramids and your Palestinian state.
Stop your financing of Islamic terrorists. Keep your
press releases and your flacks, and your notes of
"deep concern" every time a hammer hits a nail in
territory claimed by your Islamic friends. Your way
is not that of peace, but of appeasement. Your law
is the will of terrorists and their enablers. This
is not your land. It is not the land of the Muslim
conquerors whose rights you so assiduously defend.
You have no physical or moral authority here.
Let my people go.