Netanyahu, The Anti-Obama

Columnist George Will has an interesting piece that compares Barack Obama and Bibi Netanyahu and finds them to be almost total opposites:

No two leaders of democracies are less alike -- in life experiences, temperaments and political philosophies -- than Netanyahu, the former commando and fierce nationalist, and Barack Obama, the former professor and post-nationalist. {...}

Winston Churchill, who considered himself "one of the authors" of Britain's embrace of Zionism. The Balfour Declaration of 1917 stated: "His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people." Beginning in 1923, Britain would govern Palestine under a League of Nations mandate.

Netanyahu, his focus firmly on Iran, honors Churchill because he did not flinch from facts about gathering storms. Obama returned to the British Embassy in Washington the bust of Churchill that was in the Oval Office when he got there. {...}

Arguably the most left-wing administration in American history is trying to knead and soften the most right-wing coalition in Israel's history. The former shows no understanding of the latter, which thinks it understands the former all too well.

The prime minister honors Churchill, who spoke of "the confirmed unteachability of mankind." Nevertheless, a display case in Netanyahu's office could teach the Obama administration something about this leader. It contains a small signet stone that was part of a ring found near the Western Wall. It is about 2,800 years old -- 200 years younger than Jerusalem's role as the Jewish people's capital. The ring was the seal of a Jewish official, whose name is inscribed on it: Netanyahu.

No one is less a transnational progressive, less a post-nationalist, than Binyamin Netanyahu, whose first name is that of a son of Jacob, who lived perhaps 4,000 years ago. Netanyahu, whom no one ever called cuddly, once said to a U.S. diplomat 10 words that should warn U.S. policymakers who hope to make Netanyahu malleable: "You live in Chevy Chase. Don't play with our future."

Another important difference - While Netanyahu is hardly a stranger to academia as an MIT graduate, he has actually accomplished things in real life outside that cocoon beyond the mere playing of political games. Barack Obama never has. His entire life has been spent either in academia or at the trough of public office, manipulating the system to get himself elected.

What Will is saying ( but doesn't quite bring himself to say) is that in Netanyahu's case, Israel has a leader with strong roots and a true love and appreciation of his country, deeply committed to its interests and well-being. In Obama, the United States has almost exactly the opposite - someone who, deep down, simply does not like the country of his birth and sees it as his place to see to it that America makes 'reparations' and 'apologies' for what he sees as its perceived evil.

Not to make a psychograph out of this, but one wonders if the two men's past has anything to do with these attitudes.Netanyahu came from a close knit family with a father, Ben-Zion, who was a committed patriot and deeply moral man whom Netanyahu adores and who still influences him.

Barack Hussein Obama was essentially abandoned by both parents, and the closest things he had to a father were his leftist grandfather who was frequently absent and communist and child molester Frank Marshall Davis, whom Obama's grandparents put a very young Obama together with as a mentor.

In any case, Will has it right - the men are polar opposites in history, mentality and character.

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