Right-wing talk show host Laurie Roth was none too pleased when President Obama didn’t personally thank Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu after Netanyahu likely secured a third consecutive term in last week’s elections. In a column for BarbWire, the right-wing “news” site operated by religious right pundit Matt Barber, Roth claims that when the only American expression of thanks came from Secretary of State John Kerry, it proved that Obama was an enemy of Israel.
Roth claimed that Obama hates Netanyahu because Bibi has let it be known time and again that he “won’t be intimidated into giving away more land or kissing up to the Islamic agenda?.which is simply ? destroy Israel.” Translation–since Obama doesn’t blindly support Israel, the only plausible explanation is that he is indeed a radical Mooslim in disguise. What Roth didn’t tell her readers is that Bibi undoubtedly owes his victory to one of the most egregious cases of inflaming passions in recent memory. For those who missed it, on election day, with polls suggesting that Bibi’s Likud party might get nosed out by the opposition Zionist Union, Bibi took to Facebook to warn that Arabs were being “bused to the polling stations in droves” by his opponents.
Simply put, this was race baiting–a tactic that should never be acceptable in any self-respecting democracy. And yet, even in the face of this, Roth says that anything less than blind support of Israel makes you no different from a terrorist. I know the religious right is speaking mostly to an audience that walls itself off from the rest of the world. But even for someone who crowed that Republican gains in the 2014 elections were an answer to six years worth of prayer, this is ridiculous.
After being kicked up, down, and sideways by virtually the entire international community, many of his own countrymen, as well as a number of Jewish organizations, Netanyahu had the decency to apologize earlier today. Perhaps Roth should consider apologizing as well–to those of us who have the idea that supporting Israel doesn’t mean supporting it no matter what it does, right or wrong.
