Mary Robinson

No second thoughts

By Jonathan Tobin


Is Obama's bestowing Presidential Medal of Freedom on woman who presided over a United Nation's anti-Semitic hate fest yet another testing of the waters for future outrages against Israel?

http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | When asked about whether US President Barack Obama was rethinking his decision to give Mary Robinson his nation's highest civilian award, a spokesman for the White House was quoted as saying that the president "had no second thoughts" about giving the former Irish president the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Indeed, the ceremony went off without a hitch and nary a discouraging word as Robinson and 15 other less controversial recipients got their medals amid a blizzard of presidential praise.

Obama lauded Robinson, the woman who presided over the United Nation's anti-Semitic hate fest at the 2001 Durban Conference on racism, as "an advocate for the hungry and the hunted, the forgotten and the ignored," and ignored the widespread criticism of the honoree from a wide range of Jewish groups as well as some members of Congress.

Robinson is a longtime foe of the Jewish state and even today holds the post of honorary president of Oxfam, an NGO that gained publicity last week for firing actress Kirstin Davis of Sex and the City fame as its spokeswoman because she also represents Ahava, whose Dead Sea cosmetics are considered off-limits by Israel-haters.

The funny thing is that Jewish businesses operating in Judea and Samaria actually create jobs for the Arabs living there. These leftist NGO's like Oxfam and many others expose their agenda as one not being about the improvement of
life for the Palestinians, who's lives have been vastly improved since 1967, but rather for the abolishment of Israel. Look at how life in Gaza has been since Israel left and hamas took over.

Though the dustup over Robinson cast something of a shadow on an event that is almost always non-controversial (because the White House generally eliminates questionable candidates), the dispute did not generate a great deal of publicity. It was Robinson's good fortune that the weeks leading up to the ceremony were dominated by a divisive national debate over health care reform.

Even Obama's most virulent critics on the right were too preoccupied with the debate over the president's massive expansion of government power for it to register much of an impact on the nation's political Richter scale.

But friends of Israel, especially those Jewish Democrats who have been doing their best to ignore the White House's increasingly belligerent tone toward the Jewish state, would do well to note what happened with Robinson. Obama honored a virulent enemy of Israel, someone who bore a great deal of responsibility for Durban, one of the most disgraceful episodes in the history of an institution — the UN — that is no stranger to disgrace. And he has gotten away with it with hardly a scratch on his reputation.

Though some will dismiss this incident as a minor mistake that will soon be forgotten, the main lesson to be learned here may not be the one about presidential award nominations needing to be more thoroughly vetted. Rather, it may be that as much as this was an unforced error on the part of the White House, what Obama and his advisers may take away from this incident is how easily they were able to dismiss a nearly universal Jewish dismay.

There was nothing mistaken about it. Robinson was chosen precisely because she is anti-Israel. This was an screw you from obama to the pro-Israel community. When will liberal Jews get it? Read the rest