Consequences of America derogating from its leadership of the free world

Ruth Wisse writes for Mosaic Magazine. She asks,

What are we to make of the current flight of Jews from the country that gave us enlightenment, emancipation, religious tolerance, political liberty and freedom of thought?

That is the main question of Alain El-Mouchan’s essay on the rise of anti-Jewish violence in France and consequent increased Jewish movement to Israel.

...French authorities and the French media refuse to identify openly Islamist perpetrators as Muslims or their targets as Jews:

This refusal to identify either the culprits or their victims by their proper names—a refusal typical also of the Obama administration—has perversely combined with the swift posting of police and military guards at Jewish institutions to make Jews feel that at best they have become “protected citizens” in their own country, reinforcing the idea that they are no longer at home in France but are rather a new kind of dhimmi.

In at least two respects, I believe that America is becoming more vulnerable to the politics of blame that undermine democracies from within. One is the impress of a twice-elected president who has staked his foreign policy on an alliance with Iran as opposed to Israel. That the leaders of Iran link their promise of “death to America” to their intention of obliterating Israel has merely quickened Barack Obama’s resolve to accommodate the attackers. Some ascribe his behavior to error, others to the so-called school of “realism,” still others to an ideological dislike of precisely the political exceptionalism that both America and Israel represent. Motives aside, however, President Obama has clearly courted America’s Muslim and anti-democratic antagonists at the expense of its strongest allies, Israel foremost among them.

For its part, the political left blends its anti-capitalist, anti-religious “internationalism” with support for autocratic, religious, and xenophobic Arabs on the basis of a common opposition to Judaism and Jews. American universities are only now beginning to acknowledge the anti-Israel agitation they have condoned for decades, much of it fueled by professors who teach inverted history and perverted politics.

...Obama’s Jews may not have been able to prevent him from weakening America, but as an early-warning system of freedom, they were duty-bound to try. Instead they have earned his contempt and history’s judgment.

As America increasingly derogates from its leadership of the free world, the alliance with Israel, once upheld as a point of national pride, has become instead a reason for affronting the Jewish state and slighting its concerns. Future presidents will no doubt try to reclaim America’s global preeminence and to reverse the policies that have withered it. But both Americans and their enemies will have seen the cracks in the foundation of what had long seemed so unshakeable a commitment to unshakeable standards, principles, values—and friends.

Read more here.