Former Israel Ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren, is the point person in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s hate campaign against President Barack Obama, and against the movement to bring peace. Oren’s attacks are a sophisticated strategy to broaden the assault against both Obama and peace, and cast critics of Israel’s extremist policies as “anti-Semites” or worse
By Ray Hanania
Ray Hanania
Don’t you love it when a person born in the United States so easily eschews his citizenship to promote a foreign country’s interests over the interests of America?
I always wonder why the right-wing “patriots” who scream “love it or leave” react when an American turncoats his allegiance, throws away all that America gave him and goes to Israel.
For me, I say good riddance to people like Michael Oren, the foul-mouthed anti-Arab racist who served as Israel’s ambassador to the United States.
But for Oren, it isn’t enough to trample all over America’s generosity as his birth nation. Oren also bashes any American that dares to ask the question, “What’s really in America’s best interests, to be subservient to Israel or to be a true American and stand up for what’s right.”
Oren has been blasting President Barack Obama in what is clearly a calculated public relations campaign to promote his book, “Ally,” which claims to offer insights into the relationship between Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Oren attacks Obama claiming he “championed the Palestinian cause.”
These former Americans who want to hate on America. They really like to exaggerate to make their point.
U.S. Ambassador Dan Shapiro, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren. Photo by Ambassador Ron DermerDid Obama abandon Israel’s interests to champion the rights of Palestinians? Or did he simply say what many American politicians are afraid to say, that Israel does not run America. Israel should not control the Congress. Israel doesn’t own the American taxpayer. Israel doesn’t get a pass from adhering to the International rule of law. And, more importantly, Israel is not more important than America.
The second goal is to support his friend, Netanyahu, who appointed him as Israel’s top diplomat to Washington, D.C.
Oren was actually born in New York as Michael Scott Bornstein and grew up in New Jersey.
Ironically, Oren moved to Israel because he was inspired by the then Israeli Ambassador to the United States, Yitzhak Rabin. The problem is, Oren met Rabin when Rabin was the representative of Israel’s violence and terrorism against Palestinian civilians, not when Rabin changed and tried to become a human, leading Israel and Palestine to a final peace based on two-states.
Rabin was murdered by a disciple of the man whom Oren later followed, Benjamin Netanyahu, the American educated extremist who has a steady grip on Israel’s destructive anti-peace future.
Instead of serving in the United States military, as would any American proud of their heritage, Oren served in the Israeli military.
His right-wing extremism grew in Israel, as did his hatred for Arabs.
You see, hardcore Israelis hate all Arabs, not just the Muslims, although they sometimes see Christian Palestinians as “opportunities” to score PR points.
Israel extremist Michael Oren
Today, Oren is subservient to Netanyahu first, not to honest diplomacy. Oren, who abandoned his American upbringing, easily fit well into the right-wing, hate-driven society in Israel.
Because in Israel, hate sells.
We joke about “selling hate” in America in TV sitcoms all the time. The recent TV show “Happyish” had a constant theme of how hate can move audiences.
Oren represents everything that is corrupt in the relationship between Israel and America. Israel, today, doesn’t want peace. It wants conflict. That’s the core value that Netanyahu has fine-tuned and offers to the Israeli public, many of them also individuals who were raised in the graciousness of America but have chosen instead to live in Israel while asserting themselves in America’s policies. This ensures that America never places its own interests before the interests of Israel.
That doesn’t excuse the ineptitude of the Arab side, though. Oren engages high-priced strategic communications and public relations knowing that is the only way to manipulate American minds.
The dysfunctional representatives of the Arab world in the United States, from Egypt to Bahrain to even Palestine, have stumbled through their jobs just happy to have them. They’ve never even tried to apply strategic communications and public relations, let alone writing a biased book, to make their powerful case to the American people. They’re incompetent.
And that’s why Oren looks so good to many. The people he is fighting are incompetent.
In that kind of a relationship, extremism, hatred, right-wing fanaticism and a rejection of fundamental American principles like the rule of law and civil rights get glossed over in America.
So Michael Scott Bornstein decided to write a book bashing Obama and America. What else is new?
Ray Hanania is an award-winning Palestinian American columnist managing editor of The Arab Daily News at www.TheArabDailyNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @RayHanania. To find out more about Ray Hanania and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com.
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Ray Hanania is an award winning political and humor columnist who analyzes American and Middle East politics, and life in general. He is an author of several books.
Hanania covered Chicago Politics and Chicago City Hall from 1976 through 1992 at the Daily Southtown and the Chicago Sun-Times. He began writing in 1975 publishing The Middle Eastern Voice newspaper in Chicago (1975-1977). He later published “The National Arab American Times” newspaper (2004-2007).
Hanania writes weekly columns on Middle East and American Arab issues as Special US Correspondent for the Arab News ArabNews.com, at TheArabDailyNews.com, and at SuburbanChicagoland.com. He has published weekly columns in the Jerusalem Post newspaper, YNetNews.com, Newsday, the Orlando Sentinel, Houston Chronical, and Arlington Heights Daily Herald.
Hanania is the recipient of four (4) Chicago Headline Club “Peter Lisagor Awards” for Column writing. In November 2006, he was named “Best Ethnic American Columnist” by the New American Media. In 2009, Hanania received the prestigious Sigma Delta Chi Award for Writing from the Society of Professional Journalists. He is the recipient of the MT Mehdi Courage in Journalism Award. He was honored for his writing skills with two (2) Chicago Stick-o-Type awards from the Chicago Newspaper Guild. In 1990, Hanania was nominated by the Chicago Sun-Times editors for a Pulitzer Prize for his four-part series on the Palestinian Intifada.
His writings have also been honored by two national Awards from ADC for his writing, and from the National Arab American Journalists Association.
Hanania is the US Special Correspondent for the Arab News Newspaper, covering Middle East and Arab American issues. He writes for the Southwest News newspaper group writing on mainstream American issues.
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