(CAROLINE GLICK) — U.S. President Barack Obama’s eulogy to Shimon Peres last Friday at Mt. Herzl was a thinly disguised assault on Israel. And he barely bothered to hide it.
Throughout his remarks, Obama wielded Peres’s record like a baseball bat. He used it to club the Israeli public and its elected leaders over and over again.
Peres, Obama intimated, was a prophet. But the suspicious, tribal people of Israel were too stiff necked to follow him.
In what was perhaps the low point of a low performance, Obama used Peres’s words to slander his domestic critics as racist oppressors.
“Shimon,” he began harmlessly enough, “believed that Israel’s exceptionalism was rooted not only in fidelity to the Jewish people, but to the moral and ethical vision, the precepts of his Jewish faith.”
Fair enough. You could say that about every Israeli leader since the dawn of modern Zionism.
But then Obama went for the jugular.