Obama's deep thoughts about the tragedy in the Middle East make no sense

Except as a method of evading his responsibility for it

We haven’t heard much from Barack Obama lately. I assume he’s devoting his time to enriching himself (not that there’s anything wrong with that).

But the urge to opine on the situation in Israel and Gaza proved irresistible for the former pontificator-in-chief. And, as in the bad old days, he fulfilled that urge pompously and inanely.

Obama led off with this gem:

If there’s any chance of us being able to act constructively to do something, it will require an admission of complexity, and maintaining what on the surface may seem contradictory ideas that what Hamas did was horrific, and there’s no justification for it. And what is also true is that the occupation and what’s happening to Palestinians is [sic] unbearable.

But the “occupation” has nothing to do with what Hamas did or with Israel’s response. Israel does not occupy Gaza, and hasn’t since 2005. It only occupies the West Bank. Palestinians from the West Bank did not attack Israel on October 7 and Israel is not waging war in that region.

What about Obama’s claim that “what’s happening to Palestinians is unbearable”? I’ll stipulate that life in Gaza is probably unbearable, but that’s due to Hamas, which places its quest to destroy Israel ahead of the welfare of Palestinians (e.g. tunnels for terrorists but no bomb shelters for civilians).

As for the West Bank, day-to-day life there is governed by the Palestinian Authority, which has administrative control over much of the area. Israel’s occupation consists primarily of stationing forces to prevent Palestinians from launching the kind of attack Hamas inflicted on Southern Israel and to protect Israeli settlers from attacks by those who are unwilling to live near Jews.

Is this situation unbearable? Yes, for people who want to attack Israel and for people who want to live in territory that’s judenrein (devoid of Jews).

Is the situation unbearable for ordinary Palestinians on the West Bank who just want to go about their daily lives? I don’t know. Neither does Obama.

But whether it is or it isn’t, we need not “maintain” this” idea” in order to understand Hamas’ attack on Israel — an attack intended not to end the occupation of the West Bank, but to create a Palestine “from the river to the sea” In other words to annihilate Israel and the Jews who live there. Nor do we need to maintain this idea to understand Israel’s forceful response.

There’s nothing terribly complex about the attack or Israel’s need to respond as it has. There’s only a pompous ex-president who thrives on obfuscation.

Obama continued:

And what is also true is that there is a history of the Jewish people that may be dismissed unless your grandparents, or your great-grandparents, or your uncle or your aunt tell you stories about the madness of anti-Semitism. And what is true is that there are people, right now, who are dying, who have nothing to do with what Hamas did.

What’s also true is that because of a war Obama waged, people in Iraq and Syria — thousands of them — died who had nothing to do with what ISIS did. And those civilians hadn’t elected ISIS to run their cities and hadn’t celebrated a massacre of civilians by ISIS. The residents of Gaza elected Hamas and many celebrated the October 7 massacre (as well as the 9/11 attack on America).

War is hell. Obama’s war was no exception.

The former president then kicked into high Obamaesque gear:

And what is true, right — I mean, we can go on for a while. And the problem with the social media and trying TikTok activism, and trying to debate this on that, is you can’t speak the truth. You can pretend to speak the truth. You can speak one side of the truth. And in some cases you can try to maintain your moral innocence. But that won’t solve the problem. And so, if you want to solve the problem, then you have to take in the whole truth, and you then have to admit nobody’s hands are clean — that all of us are complicit to some degree.

This passage, especially the final part, is the kind of talk that made Obama sound “deep” to third-rate minds like those of prominent media figures. To them, “all of us are complicit to some degree” sounds like an insight stemming from a profound moral philosophy.

Actually, it’s nonsense. How is the average American who goes about his or her daily business “complicit” in Hamas’ attack on Israel or Israel’s response? He or she isn’t — any more than he or she is complicit in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the civil war in Sudan, or repressive acts by the governments of Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

There is no coherent theory of moral philosophy that makes us complicit in the atrocities of Hamas, the Israeli response, or the absence of Palestinian state — although I would happily take a small piece of undeserved credit for the second and third of these things.

Here’s what’s true, though. Barack Obama is complicit in Hamas’ butchery in Southern Israel. His policy of enriching Iran, voided by Donald Trump but revived by Obama’s vice president, contributed to Hamas’ attack and might even have made it possible.

Iran has funded Hamas and supplied it with weaponry. It may also have trained the terrorists who carried out the October 7 attack. Thus, Obama’s enrichment of Iran — founded in part on the pipe dream that the mullahs could be transformed into responsible members of the international community — makes him complicit in the massacre and its aftermath.

In the next passage I want to highlight, Obama shrewdly accepts his “complicity” for reasons that don’t make him complicit:

I look back at this, and I think, ‘what could I have done during my presidency to move this forward? As hard as I tried, I’ve got the scars to prove it. But there’s a part of me that is still saying ‘well, was there something else I could have done?’ That’s the conversation we should be having. Not just looking backwards, but looking forwards.

Here, Obama is pretending to blame himself for not having resolved the impasse between Israel and the Palestinians. But as Obama knows full well, and implies in his phony mea culpa, there wasn’t anything he could have done to resolve that impasse. His error was in wasting his time trying to, and in taking shots at Israel in the process. But these errors do not make him complicit in what’s happening now.

Obama is complicit because of his appeasement of Iran. By pretending to accept a sliver of responsibility based on a different and silly rationale, he hopes to draw attention away from his real malfeasance (or misfeasance, if you want to give him the benefit of the doubt).

Now think back to the passage I quoted earlier where, in vintage Obama fashion, he complains about those who “pretend to speak the truth.” As I hope I’ve demonstrated, when it comes to the situation in Israel and Gaza, no one is pretending harder than Barack Obama.