Rabbi’s NYTimes ad urges Obama not to be ‘like Chamberlain’
Weeks after apologizing for insulting Susan Rice in an ad, Shmuley Boteach calls on president ‘not to appease Iran’
Rabbi Shmuley Boteach published a large ad Saturday in the New York Times, in which he urged Obama not to rush into a nuclear deal with Iran that many in Israel and elsewhere believe will leave Iran’s capabilities largely intact and within reach of a nuclear weapon.
In the ad, Obama’s portrait appears with the text “Mr. President: Fighting al-Qaeda made you like Churchill. Appeasing Iran will make you like Chamberlain.”
Overlain on a portrait of the president is a newspaper clip showing the cover of The New York Times edition of Friday, September 30, 1938.
Boteachwas is referring to former British prime minister Winston Churchill, who led the UK during World War II.
He succeeded PM Neville Chamberlain, who went down in history as the leader who signed the Munich agreement with Adolf Hitler in 1938, paving the way for Germany’s conquest of eastern Europe.
At the bottom of the ad are the words “Don’t allow Iran to become a nuclear power.”
The ad by the New Jersey-based rabbi and author comes less than a month after he apologized to Obama’s national security adviser, Susan Rice, for a much-criticized ad that accused her of “having a blind spot for genocide.”
The ad, which ran on February 28, said “Susan Rice has a blind spot: Genocide,” criticized Rice’s complaints about Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to Congress for days before he delivered it.
The ad said Rice’s objections to the speech “could not be more wrong” and criticized her for refusing to use the word “genocide” in reference to Rwanda as a member of president Bill Clinton’s national security team.
An array of Jewish organizations, including the Anti-Defamation League and the Jewish Federations of North America, condemned the ad.
A week after the March 3 speech, Boteach penned an op-ed in the Washington Post titled “Dear Susan Rice, I’m Sorry.” In the piece, he admitted that the ad was more of a personal attack than an opinion on policy.
