…and victimology:

One aspect of the speech that hasn’t received sufficient attention is the focus on victimology: Israelis were victims of the Holocaust, Palestinians victims of dislocation after the founding of Israel, Americans the victim of the 9/11 terrorists, Arabs the victims of Western imperialism, and so forth.

That this appeals to Obama is not surprising. He and I attended law school at the same time, Obama at Harvard and me at Yale. Victimology was all the rage. It gave one not only moral standing, but, oddly enough (like Sotomayor’s “wise Latina”) a certain level of intellectual standing.

During our first year in law school, there was a one-day nationwide “student strike for diversity” at elite law schools, including Harvard and Yale. (I don’t know for sure whether Obama was involved in this “strike,” but he gave a speech on behalf of uber-diversity advocate, and Harvard lawprof, Derrick Bell.) At Yale, students gave speeches throughout the day. What struck me at the time was how eager, almost desperate, the various student speech-givers were to be perceived as victims.

As he notes, Obama ignores, or seems unaware of or indifferent to, the real reasons that we support Israel, relative to its despotic neighbors. But I guess western liberal democracies just aren’t worth defending any more. After all, it’s all culturally relative.

Oh, and speaking of Marty Peretz (about whom we’d still like to know who he voted for), he’s wondering if Dennis Ross was removed from his planned position of envoy to Iran because he’s too hawkish, or too Jewish.

…and voted “present.“

Maybe TOTUS is on summer vacation.

[Update late afternoon]

Speak for America, Mr. President:

Some argue that the brave Iranians demonstrating for freedom and democracy would be better off if the American president somehow stayed out of the fight. Really? But Barack Obama is president. His statement wouldn’t be crafted by those dreaded neocons who vulgarly thought all people would like a chance to govern themselves and deserved some modicum of U.S. support in that endeavor. It would be written by subtle liberal internationalists, who would get the pitch and tone just right. And the statement wouldn’t be delivered by the notorious George Bush (who did, however, weigh in usefully in somewhat similar situations in Ukraine and Lebanon). It would be delivered by the popular and credible speaker-to-the-Muslim-world, Barack Obama. Does anyone really think that a strong Obama statement of solidarity with the Iranian people, and a strong rebuke to those who steal elections and shoot demonstrators, wouldn’t help the dissidents in Iran?

I don’t believe it. I don’t believe Barack Obama believes it. As he put it in The Audacity of Hope: “We can inspire and invite other people to assert their freedoms;…we can speak out on behalf of local leaders whose rights are violated; and we can apply economic and diplomatic pressure to those who repeatedly violate the rights of their own people.”

Maybe someone else wrote that book. He continues to vote “present.”

[Late afternoon update]

The State Department refuses to condemn the crackdown:

Lefties keep assuring me on Twitter that western meddling will only make it easier for the regime to demonize the protesters, but (a) the demonization’s going to happen anyway, (b) no one’s asking Obama to send in the Marines, just to speak up, and (c) Angela Merkel managed to issue a statement earlier today calling the Basij thuggery “completely unacceptable” without killing the uprising in its crib. And still, from the White House, nothing. To think, some commentators are accusing The One of “cowardly silence.”

You’ll also be pleased to know that, according to no less than the New York Times, Obama didn’t bother holding any meetings or conference calls about this yesterday. Remember: Health care is a “crisis.” This is but a “situation.”

Well, to be fair, perhaps they want to avoid charges of hypocrisy when they may have to do the same thing here next November.

Victor Davis Hanson:

Iraq is proving to be amazingly resilient, not only functioning as a democracy, but by withstanding the best efforts of Iran to kill it off, proving destabilizing to Iran itself.

By removing Saddam, and trying to isolate Ahmadinejad and appeal to the Iranian people, Bush at least tried to prep the landscape for democratic change.

In contrast, Obama’s past siren calls to quit Iraq, the “optional” war, his snubbing of Maliki, his ahistorical efforts to charm the Islamic Street, and apologies to theocratic Iran while lavishing attention on Ahmadinejad put him on the wrong side of history.

If Obama were wise, he would get out pronto a statement condemning the anti-democratic violence of the Iranian government, and suggesting it follow the Iraq example of free and internationally inspected elections.

At some point, one should see that moral equivalence and multicultural non-judgementalism, however catchy for the moment, are as stupid as they are amoral, and will put the U.S in a foolish, “make it up as we go along” position.

“One” should see that, but they never do. And Obama clearly isn’t wise, and his non-stop criticism of establishing a democracy in Iraq, which got him the nomination last year, puts him in an awkward moral position to now point to it as a beacon of true hope and change in the Middle East. But that’s what the nation voted for.

[Update a few minutes later]

Obama, then and now:

In 2008 he sounded serious and committed to stopping the Iranian nuclear threat and was candid about the nature of the regime. In Cairo, all that was gone. Nary a direct word of criticism of the Iranian regime (Holocaust denial was never tied to the Iranians and was covered in a separate section of his address). In 2008 he was telling Iran it would have no nuclear capability; in 2009 he was declaring no country could tell Iran it couldn’t have a nuclear capability. A complete reversal in tone and substance.

It’s almost like he’ll say anything to get into power, after which his true agenda becomes clear.

And in this case, of course, the Jews who voted for him were the rubes (as are the astounding number of Jews who continue to vote for Democrats in general).

[Update a couple minutse later]

“Hope and change” for me, but not for thee. At least if thee is Iranian. Yes, this administration will probably cheerfully sell out the Iranian people for a “deal” with the mullahs. Which will be useless for both us and the Iranian people, but it will make the diplomats happy.

[Update a few minutes later]

Who did you vote for, Marty? I’d like to know, too.

Is the country on the verge, or already in, a civil war? Michael Totten is on the case. Hit his tip jar if you can.

[Update a couple hours later]

More over at Gateway Pundit.

[Late afternoon update]

More from Michael Totten: Insurrection, Day Two.

More news at PJM. This is interesting:

There are widespread reports of police and security forces, around Tehran and other big cities where there have been demonstrations, who are not Iranian and either speak Persian with a very pronounced Arab accent or speak no Persian at all.

From Iraq? Or elsewhere?

[Update early evening]

Iran doesn’t have elections — it has circuses:

Stalin would be proud. But even his Soviet Union eventually succumbed to the dissidents, and while the regime has most all of the guns, the chains, the clubs, the tear gas cannisters, and the torture chambers, there are tens of millions of Iranians who hate the regime. The question is whether they are prepared to face down the Basij, the police, and the Revolutionary Guards. It is usually a matter of numbers in these cases: if a million people gather in front of the Supreme Leader’s palace and demand freedom, while half that number make the same demand in front of the government buildings in Isfahan, Shiraz, Tabriz and Mashad, they might win.

Until quite recently, the Iranians did not believe they could do such a thing on their own. They believed they needed outside support, above all American support, in order to succeed. They thought that Bushitlercheney would provide that support, and they were bitterly disappointed. But nobody believes that Obama will help them, and they must know that they are on their own.

Any hope they might have had in the Obama White House was quickly dismissed in the administration’s two statements on the matter. The first came from the president himself, anticipating a Mousavi victory (it is too soon to speculate on the source of this happy thought), and of course, in his narcissistic way, taking personal credit for it:

“We are excited to see what appears to be a robust debate taking place in Iran and obviously, after the speech that I made in Cairo, we tried to send a clear message that we think there’s a possibility of change and, ultimately, the election is for the Iranians to decide but just as what has been true in Lebanon, what can be true in Iran as well, is that you’re seeing people looking at new possiblities, and whoever ends up winning the election in Iran, the fact that there’s been a robust debate hopefully will help advance our ability to engage them in new ways.”

I’ve reread the Cairo Sermon, and I can’t find a single word calling for freedom for the Iranian people. Au contraire, Obama’s words about Iran were penitent, apologizing for the American role, back in 1953, in removing what the president called an elected government (Mossadeq, that is. Except that he was appointed by the shah, not elected at all). But then, history is not his strong suit.

No, it never has been.

On the other hand, as Michael points out, the Bush administration never covered itself in glory with Iran policy, either. There was a potentially huge pro-American youth movement there that they never engaged. I though that one of the (many) purposes of removing Saddam Hussein was to intimidate the Iranian regime and encourage its opponents, but that was never obvious from administration policy post 2003. Colin Powell never really bought into that grand strategy, and perhaps Condi didn’t either. Seriously, this time, I say that I blame George Bush.