DAI Chair Makes the Case for Obama in JPost

David Streeter — October 30, 2012 – 11:43 am | Barack Obama | Election 2012 Comments (1) Add a comment

In The Jerusalem Post, Democrats Abroad-Israel’s Acting Chair Hillel Schenker explained why he is supporting President Barack Obama. Schenker wrote:

President Obama and the Democratic Party stand for values that we believe in, tikkun olam, the creation of a better world based upon civil and human rights, the Four Freedoms described by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt - freedom of speech and expression, freedom of worship, freedom from want and freedom from fear.

And today, those values are under attack. At the heart of the 2012 elections is President Obama’s defense of the President Roosevelt’s New Deal and President Johnson’s Great Society, and a preservation of the separation of church and state which has created a secure space for the American Jewish community to flourish. The Tea Party driven Republican Party is threatening to undermine women’s rights, Planned Parenthood, Medicaid and Medicare, and in general to undermine the social safety net which helps to secure the American people.

Don’t just take my word for this. The Salt Lake Tribune, in its endorsement of President Obama’s reelection, criticized candidate Romney’s ‘servile courtship of the Tea Party’ to win his party’s nomination and called him ‘shameless’ in pandering to various constituencies, terming him the GOP’s ‘shape-shifting nominee.’...

We know who President Barack Obama is: a liberal centrist who rescued the American economy preventing a decline from recession to depression and plans to continue the job of growing the American economy, and who rebuilt America’s standing in the world while withdrawing the troops from Iraq. President Obama correctly believed that an economic stimulus package was needed to save the American economy, and that what is needed today is to continue the balance between creative individual initiative and responsible government action.

And what does candidate Romney believe? We really don’t know. Is he the Romney of Massachusetts who promoted health care reform and women’s right to choose, or the Romney of the primaries, who wants to repeal the health care act and push back women’s rights? Is he the Romney of the primaries who wanted to leave more American soldiers in Iraq, or of the debates who agrees with Obama’s withdrawal plan from Iraq and Afghanistan? Is he the Romney who told donors he doesn’t believe there’s a chance for Israeli-Palestinian peace or the debate Romney who wants to move the peace process forward? And, oh yes, there is also the trickledown economics that got us into the current mess, and let’s not tax the upper 1% and the overseas investors, and the 47% of the American public who he writes off.

As for Israel and America, we know where President Obama stands. As so many senior Israeli figures have said, beginning with President Shimon Peres and Defense Minister Ehud Barak, the current American-Israeli security partnership has reached an unprecedented level. And we also know that President Obama is committed to trying once again to advance the prospects for Israeli-Palestinian peace - a fundamental interest for all of us living in Israel if we want to secure the future of our children and grandchildren…

As someone who served for eight months on the Golan Heights in the Combat Engineering Corps during the Yom Kippur War and saw his fellow soldiers falling around him, I identify with the observations of Efraim Halevy who served as chief of the Israeli intelligence service, Mossad, under three prime ministers. He said that Romney’s comments about Iran are ‘mortally destroying any chance of a resolution without war’ and are ‘a heavy blow to the ultimate interests of the United States and Israel.’

Click here to read Schenker’s full op-ed. 

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