Dennis Prager:
There is no question about whether President Obama — along with Secretary of State John Kerry and the editorial pages of many newspapers — has a particular dislike of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
But there is another question: Why? And the answer is due to an important rule of life that too few people are aware of:
Those who do not confront evil resent those who do.
Take the case at hand. The prime minister of Israel is at the forefront of the greatest battle against evil in our time — the battle against violent Muslims. No country other than Israel is threatened with extinction, and it is Iran and the many Islamic terror organizations that pose that threat.
It only makes sense, then, that no other country feels the need to warn the world about Iran and Islamic terror as much as does Israel. That’s why when Benjamin Netanyahu speaks to the United Nations about the threat Iran poses to his country’s survival and about the metastasizing cancer of Islamist violence, he, unfortunately, stands alone.
Virtually everyone listening knows he is telling the truth. And most dislike him for it. Appeasers hate those who confront evil.
Given that this president is the least likely of any president in American history to confront evil — or even identify it — while Benjamin Netanyahu is particularly vocal and eloquent about both identifying and confronting evil, it is inevitable that the former will resent the latter.
The negotiations with Iran over its nuclear weapons program are today’s quintessential example. Those who will not confront a tyranny engaged in terror from Argentina to the Middle East, and which is committed to annihilating another country, will deeply resent Israel and its leader.
For those who doubt the truth of this Rule of Life, there are plenty of other examples.
Take the Cold War. Those who lived through it will recall that those who refused to confront Communism vilified those who did. Indeed, they vilified anyone who merely labeled Communism evil. When President Ronald Reagan declared the Soviet Union an “evil empire,” he was excoriated by those who refused to do so. Yet, if the words “evil” and “empire” have any meaning, they perfectly applied to the Soviet Union. But to those who opposed Reagan, these words could not be applied to the Soviet Union.
New York Times columnists lambasted the president for using such language. The newspaper’s most prestigious columnist at the time, James Reston, condemned Reagan for his “violent criticism of Russians as an evil society.”