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Tuesday, June 23, 2009

Jewish Leader Morton Klien: Obama May Be 'Most Hostile President to Israel’

(Newsmax).President Barack Obama’s refusal to take a stand on protests in Iran stands in sharp contrast to demands he has made on Israel, Morton Klein, president of the Zionist Organization of America, says in a Newsmax interview.

“I think he should take a strong stand to support the protesters in Iran who want to transform that society into one that promotes democracy and human rights,” Klein says. ”But while meddling in Israel’s affairs and making specific demands, he explicitly states he refuses to meddle in Iran’s policies and has said almost nothing.”

Klein says leaders of Jewish organizations are rethinking their support of Obama in light of his attitude toward Israel.

“There are many leaders in the organized Jewish world who have privately discussed this issue with me, and say they are deeply concerned about Obama’s actions and policies toward Israel, and now they’re rethinking their support for Obama during the campaign and the election,” says Klein, whose organization of 30,000 members is the oldest pro-Israel group in the country.

Based on the president’s speech in Cairo on June 4 and many of his foreign policy appointments, Klein thinks Obama “may become the most hostile president to Israel ever.”

Obama’s speech was “inimical to Israel and supportive of the stream of false Palestinian Arab claims concerning Israel,” Klein says. “He is relentlessly pressuring Israel while applying virtually almost no pressure on the Palestinian Authority to fulfill its written obligations.”

As a child of survivors of the Holocaust, Klein says he was particularly offended by Obama’s comparison of the suffering of Palestinians with the Nazis’ murder of 6 million Jews during the Holocaust.

“I found this to be an abominable, odious, and ridiculously false analogy,” he says.

Klein disputes Obama’s reference to Palestinian Arabs trying to establish a state for 60 years.

“They could have had a state in 1937,” he says. “They turned it down. They could have had a state in 1948. From 1948 to 1967, when they controlled all of Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem, they never attempted to establish a state. In 2000, they were offered a state on almost all the disputed territories. They turned it down. So this is a completely false claim that they’ve been trying to establish a state for 60 years.”