BEN CARSON: Obama’s Iran Deal Sure Looks Like Anti-Semitism, Doesn’t It?

If there is a lesson to be learned by the fact Donald Trump (25 percent), Ben Carson (12) and Carly Fiorina (5) combine for some 38 percent of the vote in the Republican primary field according to the latest Fox News poll, and another straight-talking candidate (Ted Cruz, at 10 percent) can be thrown in to make for nearly half the vote, it’s that voters are tired of focus-group-tested, mealy-mouthed messaging and want political candidates willing to actually say what they think.

Carson’s rise especially shows the appetite for a candidate willing to speak plainly about the relationship between philosophy and policy and to identify the causes behind what’s in the headlines. And on Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace, he did just that – pointing out that there is a sizable streak of anti-semitism coloring President Obama’s deal with Iran.

This isn’t a particularly controversial or provocative statement, after all. Obama and his secretary of state John Kerry both have a history of demonstrable exasperation with Israel and this administration has been solicitous of Israel’s sworn enemies the Iranians and Palestinians on a scale no previous modern administration has. And the Iran deal, which makes some $150 billion available to the Iranians when it’s completely foreseeable a sizable chunk of that money will be used to bankroll Hezbollah and Hamas, sure looks like an affront to Israeli national security.

So Carson made the statement in an op-ed piece in the Jerusalem Post about the highly-divisive speech the president gave at American University defending the Iran deal that Obama’s “diatribe also was replete with coded innuendos employing standard anti-Semitic themes involving implied disloyalty and nefarious influences related to money and power,” and the media elite had a collective stroke. You’re not supposed to call things as you see them in such terms. So naturally, Wallace felt the need to grill Carson on the subject – and the retired neurosurgeon didn’t back down an inch (Iran deal exchange begins at 5:40)…

“Well, all you have to do, Chris, is, like I have, go to Israel, and talk to average people, on all ends of that spectrum. And I couldn’t find a single person there who didn’t feel that this administration had turned their back on Israel. And I think the position of president of [the] United States should be one where you begin to draw people together behind a vision, not one where you castigate those who believe differently from you. I think it’s a possibility for great healing, if it is used in the correct way.”

When asked what specifically is anti-Semitic “in what the president is saying,” Carson responded, “I think anything is anti-Semitic that is against the survival of a state that is surrounded by enemies, and by people who want to destroy them. And to sort of ignore that, and to act like everything is normal there, and that these people are paranoid, I think that’s anti-Semitic.”

That Obama is no particular fan of Israel is a statement you have to be willfully ignorant not to accept. One of Obama’s political mentors, after all, was the Palestinian activist and Columbia professor Rashid Khalidi, who made a career out of attacking Israel. Couple that background with a series of slights to Israel’s political leadership, meddling in Israeli elections and hostile policy like the Iran deal and the shocking thing isn’t that Obama’s administration is anti-semitic in orientation but that it takes someone new to the political scene to point it out.

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