Obama Returns to Fan the Flames He Lit

Jews are called pushy, loud, hysterical, warmongering, aggressive, and now, courtesy of Barack Obama, we can add another adjective to the list. Speaking in Belfast on October 13, 2026, as he embarked on a three-city tour, the Pontificator-in-Chief reportedly stated that Jews (not Israelis or Zionists, by the way!) have a history of being “excessive”:

The fact is that the Jewish people for millennia were oppressed, discriminated against, killed. Europe was responsible for much of that. They understandably sought a refuge in a place where they had historic ties. That is undeniable. What is also undeniable is that they took land off people and they were excessive. And those people understandably said, ‘This is injustice and I want my land back.

Apparently, Jewish self-defense is now excessive. He would rather the Jews go back to the time when they were oppressed, discriminated against and killed. Blaming “Europeans” for much of Jewish oppression, he ignores the Muslim conquest of the Middle East (Khaybar, Khaybar, ya yahud anyone?) Jewish second-class status in the Muslim world, millennia of persecution, pogroms, murder, rape and social mistreatment, and Jewish expulsion from many regions of the Middle East that preceded and followed the creation of the State of Israel. But it’s those damned Jews who are at fault apparently.

Obama reportedly further argued that the Jewish State has ceded the “moral ground” by refusing to make further concessions to terrorists set on destroying it. His advice to the Palestinians, on the other hand, was to “recognize that precisely because Israel is strong, and they’re not going anywhere, that then requires a strategy that is not premised on beating their military.” That’s a fairly low bar you have set there, Mr. President. Apparently, decades upon decades of Palestinian intransigence and terror and the enabling of this by international bodies deserves no opprobrium.

For those incurious enough to ask, the start of Mr. Obama’s speaking tour took place six days after the third anniversary of the October 7 terrorist attacks, wherein the world saw the new Palestinian strategy of mass kidnapping, rape and murder of Israel’s civilian population and which was not focused on Israel’s military. Perhaps a strategy that recognizes the Jewish right of self-determination would have been better advice, Mr. President.

None of this should surprise anyone who lived through the Obama presidency. The Belfast remarks are not a departure from his well-established views. They are a culmination of decades’ long beliefs. In Cairo in 2009, barely months into his first term, he grounded Israel’s legitimacy in the Holocaust rather than in three thousand years of Jewish history, and he spoke of the “displacement” of Palestinians brought by Israel’s founding. That framing, Israel as a European guilt offering imposed on the natives, is now the founding catechism of the campus Left.

He spent eight years treating Jewish construction in Jerusalem as the principal obstacle to peace, pursued a nuclear agreement with a regime whose raison d’etre is “Death to Israel” and who bankrolls Hamas and other terror organizations around the world, and on his way out the door declined to veto Security Council Resolution 2334, leaving the Western Wall of the Temple Mount branded as occupied territory. Each act carried the same message – those meddlesome Jews are an obstacle to his vision of “Hope” and “Change.”

A generation came of age politically under that message, and it absorbed the lesson more thoroughly than its teacher through a confluence of technological growth and societal upheaval. To them, Israel is a settler-colonialist disease to be managed rather than a historical ally to be defended and the sole democracy in the Middle East. Zohran Mamdani rode a platform openly hostile to Israel all the way to City Hall. The new generation did not need to invent its antisemitism-masquerading-as-anti-Zionism. It inherited a respectable version from the White House and simply stripped off the diplomatic varnish. Where Obama spoke of “settlements” and “moral ground,” his heirs speak the language of false accusations of genocide and occupation, sing praises to the forces of “resistance” and physically attack Jews who have the temerity to publicly show their Jewishness.

To maintain relevance, Mr. Obama is back with a vengeance. Days before Belfast, Obama recorded an advertisement for Abdul El-Sayed, the progressive up-and-comer in Michigan, praising his opposition to foreign military aid, and he waved off concerns that El-Sayed is “really left wing” by invoking FDR. Then he took his show to arenas in Belfast, Glasgow, and Manchester and told those audiences what they wanted to hear about the Jews. The socialist-anarchist surge on both sides of the Atlantic did not arise from nowhere. It grew in soil that Barack Obama has spent nearly two decades fertilizing with his animus to the Jewish State’s unwillingness to accept his worldview.

The few remaining Democrats who hoped or expected the former president to be the moderate check on the Left’s hostility toward the Jewish State will try to deflect from this by pointing fingers elsewhere, but the record speaks for itself.