GOP congressman rapped for charging Obama is ‘playing for some other team’
J Street calls Rep. Lee Zeldin’s implication about the president ‘appalling’ and ‘unacceptable,’ NJDC demands he apologize
WASHINGTON — After Rep. Lee Zeldin created a firestorm for publicly musing whether US President Barack Obama is “playing for some other team,” liberal Jewish organizations castigated the GOP congressman for suggesting their commander in chief is secretly acting as a foreign agent.
In a statement Wednesday, Zeldin responded to a Wall Street Journal report that US officials delivered $400 million in cash to Iran last January, coinciding with the release of four American hostages being held in Tehran. The article centered around Obama authorizing the payment as part of a settlement for a failed arms deal decades ago. In 1979, Iran paid for weapons that were not delivered after the Shah was overthrown.
Zeldin designated the hand over a “ransom” and said it “shows that yet again the Obama administration will go to great lengths, at any and all costs, to appease Iran and show weakness to our enemies.”
“When deals like this are cut, one has to truly wonder whether the President has no idea what he is doing, or if he knows exactly what he is doing and is playing for some other team,” he added.
Obama emphatically denied that the cash transfer was related to the prisoner exchange, and told reporters at a Pentagon press conference Thursday that the United States does “not pay ransom for hostages.”
Zeldin’s comment was widely interpreted to suggest the president is working for Iran or another foreign interest.
The liberal Washington-based group J Street was among those to react in such a way, calling his words a “thinly veiled insinuation that President Obama is acting out of loyalty to some entity outside the United States.”
The organization called that “appalling and unbecoming for a member of the United States Congress” in a press release on Thursday.
“Elected officials have and will continue to have disagreements over the merits of the Iran nuclear deal and the President’s foreign policy,” it went on. “But when those disagreements move beyond the realm of reasoned argument and become attacks on the basic integrity and loyalty of the President, an inviolable line has been crossed.”
The National Jewish Democratic Council posted a statement Friday expressing similar outrage over the implication Obama is operating with dual loyalty. The group said his comments “attack the fundamental integrity of our president are beyond the boundaries of acceptable and productive discourse surrounding United States foreign policy.”
The statement proceeded to convey a sense of cultural identification with the allegation made of the president. “Jewish Americans on both sides of the aisle in our government have long dealt with hateful accusations of loyalty to Israel at the expense of their duty to the United States,” it said.
“Since 2015, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) have both faced similar attacks linking Jewish identity to their commitment to serving the American people,” it continued. “Accusations such as these, whether directed at Jews or not, are offensive and wrong.”
It closed by calling on Rep. Zeldin to “apologize to President Obama and to take leadership going forward in advancing political discourse that respects the integrity and intentions of our elected leaders.”
The Times of Israel Community.