When does the water get too hot?

    The proverbial frog is placed in tepid water and is comfortable.  The water is gently heated; the frog remains content.  As the temperature rises beyond the point its body can survive, the frog dies.
    Much of the Jewish world during the years immediately preceding the Holocaust was like that frog--more or less unaware of the import of the foul wind that swept through Germany and that burst upon much of the rest of Europe.  I wonder whether the position of the Jews in America is akin to that of the Jews of 1930s Europe, akin to the proverbial frog.
    Strong words, a strong reaction to recent trends and events.  Paranoid perhaps?  My view is that one must be vigilant (that is, awake, aware, on watch), serious, informed, and appropriately vocal.  I am not a brave person, but I certainly air my concerns in conversations with family and friends and in posts on this blog. 

    Some observations:

• Our president desires strongly to befriend the Muslim world
  
  • (his first interview since taking office  was with Al Arabiya [Jan 27, 2009]), at which he said: “My job to the Muslim world is to communicate that the Americans are not your enemy.”
  • He gave a widely reported speech in Ankara, Turkey, on Monday, April 6, in which he made the following gracious comments (source: Whitehouse.gov):

"I know there have been difficulties these last few years. I know that the trust that binds the United States and Turkey has been strained, and I know that strain is shared in many places where the Muslim faith is practiced. So let me say this as clearly as I can: The United States is not, and will never be, at war with Islam. (Applause.) In fact, our partnership with the Muslim world is critical not just in rolling back the violent ideologies that people of all faiths reject, but also to strengthen opportunity for all its people.

 

I also want to be clear that America's relationship with the Muslim community, the Muslim world, cannot, and will not, just be based upon opposition to terrorism. We seek broader engagement based on mutual interest and mutual respect. We will listen carefully, we will bridge misunderstandings, and we will seek common ground. We will be respectful, even when we do not agree. We will convey our deep appreciation for the Islamic faith, which has done so much over the centuries to shape the world -- including in my own country. The United States has been enriched by Muslim Americans. Many other Americans have Muslims in their families or have lived in a Muslim-majority country -- I know, because I am one of them. (Applause.)

[Emphasis added--H. A. Massig.]

•    Our president desires strongly to engage Iran.  See the following from the Wall Street Journal, March 12, 2009:

The Obama administration is considering lifting a ban on regular diplomatic contacts with Iran and looking at ways to develop a direct line of communication to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, said officials briefed on the deliberations.

• As Iran progresses toward nuclear capability, our president speaks softly and carries a small stick. 

• See, for example, the following quotes and analysis from the Wall Street Journal about the President's speech in Prague on Sunday, April 5:

"Rules must be binding. Violations must be punished. Words must mean something."

So declared President Obama Sunday in Prague regarding North Korea's missile launch, which America's U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice added was a direct violation of U.N. resolutions. At which point, the Security Council spent hours debating its nonresponse, thus proving to nuclear proliferators everywhere that rules aren't binding, violations won't be punished, and words of warning mean nothing. ...

Rarely has a Presidential speech been so immediately and transparently divorced from reality as Mr. Obama's in Prague. The President delivered a stirring call to banish nuclear weapons at the very moment that North Korea and Iran are bidding to trigger the greatest proliferation breakout in the nuclear age. Mr. Obama also proposed an elaborate new arms-control regime to reduce nuclear weapons, even as both Pyongyang and Tehran are proving that the world's great powers lack the will to enforce current arms-control treaties.    ...  

Mr. Obama recognized this rogue proliferation threat in his Prague address, but to counter it he offered only more treaties of the kind that are already ignored. OK, not merely more treaties. Two days earlier in Strasbourg he also vouchsafed the power of his own moral example.

"And I had an excellent meeting with President Medvedev of Russia to get started that process of reducing our nuclear stockpiles, which will then give us a greater moral authority to say to Iran, don't develop a nuclear weapon; to say to North Korea, don't proliferate nuclear weapons," Mr. Obama said, implying that previous American Presidents had lacked such "authority."

The President went even further in Prague, noting that "as a nuclear power -- as the only nuclear power to have used a nuclear weapon -- the United States has a moral responsibility to act." That barely concealed apology for Hiroshima is an insult to the memory of Harry Truman, who saved a million lives by ending World War II without a bloody invasion of Japan. As for the persuasive power of "moral authority," we should have learned long ago that the concept has no meaning in Pyongyang or Tehran, much less in the rocky hideouts of al Qaeda.

The truth is that Mr. Obama's nuclear vision has reality exactly backward. To the extent that the U.S. has maintained a large and credible nuclear arsenal, it has prevented war, defeated the Soviet Union, shored up our alliances and created an umbrella that persuaded other nations that they don't need a bomb to defend themselves.

[Emphasis added.]

•  Meanwhile, Israel looks on with some apprehension, as the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff understands, as noted in "Warnings on Iran" (Wall Street Journal, Review & Outlook, April 6, 2009:
  
  • Benjamin Netanyahu formally became Israel's Prime Minister last week, and he could not have been blunter about the strategic challenge ahead: "It is a mark of disgrace for humanity that several decades after the Holocaust the world's response to the calls by Iran's leader to destroy the state of Israel is weak, there is no condemnation and decisive measures -- almost as if dismissed as routine." He added, "We cannot afford to take lightly megalomaniac tyrants who threaten to annihilate us."
    
    Americans in key positions have noticed this Israeli message. In a meeting Thursday at the Journal, Admiral Mike Mullen, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told us that "there is a leadership in Israel that is not going to tolerate" a nuclear Iran. Tehran's atomic designs, he said, were a matter of "life or death" for the Jewish state. "The operative word is 'existential.'" When we asked him whether Israel was capable of inflicting meaningful damage to Iran's nuclear installations, his answer was a simple "Yes."
    
    The Admiral was also clear about Iran's challenge to the U.S. "I think we've got a problem now. . . . I think the Iranians are on a path to building nuclear weapons." For the time being his counsel is diplomacy, noting that "Even in the darkest days of the Cold War we talked to the Soviets." But, he added, "we don't have a lot of time."

[Emphasis mine.]

• Israel wonders whether America is behind her, and with good reason, as the following about Vice President Joe Biden illustrates (Haaretz, April 8, 2009)
  
  • United States Vice President Joe Biden told CNN on Tuesday he did not think that Israel's new government would order a strike on Iran's nuclear facilities.
    
    "I don't believe that Prime Minister [Benjamin] Netanyahu would do that. I think he would be ill-advised to do that," Biden told the U.S. network's reporter Wolf Blitzer. "And so my level of concern is no different than it was a year ago."
    
    Israel and Western nations suspect Iran's nuclear program is a cover for developing bombs. Iran, the world's fourth-largest oil producer, says it is a peaceful drive to generate electricity.
    
    Biden's comments came after President Shimon Peres said on Monday that a "sophisticated and devious" Iranian regime has managed to hide the Islamic Republic's nuclear ambitions from the world.

[Emphasis mine.]

    My concern is that Obama's great belief in the rationality of human affairs and his great confidence in his own moral voice lead him to view America's enemies as the good guys!  As if to say, "if you hate me, it must have been because of something I did.  My main task is to seek the love of you, my enemy."  It has been said about Carter that he was warm to enemies and cool to friends, and I see this in Obama.  If this perspective is correct, then Israel becomes a problem--because Israel's own experience does not fit into Obama's view of the world and human rationality.   To the extent that America's Jews share Israel's anxieties about her own welfare, where does that put them?  Add to this our president's concern to curry the favor of the Muslim world, and I wonder where the Jewish world is left.

    "What do you recommend?" my family ask.  I answer:  be vigilant, serious, informed, and appropriately vocal. 

-- H. A. Massig