Former Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren has said that he asked for the publication of his book to be moved up specifically so it would intervene in the debate over the Obama Administration’s proposed Iran deal. Part of his effort has involved an effort to reopen a discussion about the nature of the Iranian regime. In one of his op-eds, published in the Los Angeles Times, Oren took aim at a statement President Barack Obama made in a May interview with journalist Jeffrey Goldberg, regarding the anti-Semitism expressed by some Iranian leaders. Asked by Goldberg whether a regime that espouses such views can be counted on to be entirely rational, the president responded: “Well, the fact that you are anti-Semitic, or racist, doesn’t preclude you from being interested in survival. It doesn’t preclude you from being rational about the need to keep your economy afloat; it doesn’t preclude you from making strategic decisions about how you stay in power; and so the fact that the supreme leader is anti-Semitic doesn’t mean that this overrides all of his other considerations.”
A number of writers quickly pounced on these remarks, arguing that they revealed a flaw in the president’s policy. “Obama believes that the Iranian government’s anti-Semitism is subject to the same rational cost-benefit calculus as any other aspects of a nation’s behavior, even if anti-Semitism is itself irrational,” wrote Armin Rosen in Business Insider, suggesting that this represented “a tension in Obama’s thinking that could prove fatal to his top foreign policy priority.” Tony Badran of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies even wrote that the interview shows that, “Obama will even defend anti-Semitism to spin his Iran deal.”
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