Forgotten is our peculiar urban folklore, yesteryear’s spontaneous fun of small Israeli kids rapidly rolling off their tongues the names of assorted Syrian tyrants. This singsong accompanied sidewalk games and was a staple of silly summertime tongue-twister contests.

Nobody then remotely believed that riots and havoc in neighboring autocracies could betoken the rise of democracy in the Arab-speaking sphere.

But for too long we’ve lost touch with our not-so-distant past, a time when recurrent “Arab Springs” were once announced with dizzying frequency. In Syria especially they followed in furious succession until, in 1970, one Hafez Assad proclaimed the longest-lasting self-styled spring and actually managed to pass on control of the abundant Damascene sunshine and blossoms to his son, Bashar.

Both Assads’ nastiness and penchant for massacres were hardly unique in their country. Syria spawned carnage and “popular uprisings” a dime a dozen. Only the durability of Assad-dynasty despotism was unusual.

Nonetheless, now – having learned to view the world through the tinted lenses of hypocrite Europe and bedazzled America – we, too, fall for the “budding democracy” babble.

But back in the less-blinkered day, our assessments were more clear-headed. Never would we ascribe high-mindedness to Syrian power-grabbers. Rather than be wowed, we laughed. Incomparable satirist Shai K.(Shaikeh) Ophir popularized a sidesplitting routine consisting of a roll-call of Syrian tyrants going back to 1948. He recited them with what in hindsight appears like a forerunner of fast-paced rapper-style chants.

It was so all the rage that little pigtailed girls skipped rope and did hopscotch stunts while rhythmically intoning a sequence of rhyming names like Adib Shishakli and Shukri al-Quwatli. For a while, these were basic fare at Israeli playgrounds.

Ophir’s register of names began with Husni Za’im, who led the Syrian army’s attack on newborn Israel in 1948 and then overthrew president Shukri al-Quwatli and imprisoned him. Za’im’s reign, alas, lasted merely four-and-a-half months. He was summarily executed by his deposer Sami Hinnawi. But before Hinnawi could get comfortable in the boss’s seat, he was unseated by Adib Shishakli and assassinated in 1950. All three coups occurred during 1949.

Shishakli refused to allow the integration of Palestinian refugees into Syrian society, and he shelled Druse villages to quell their resistance (a common practice by Syrian conventions). He was toppled in 1954 and ultimately assassinated in his Brazilian supposed safe-haven.

Next came caretaker president Hashim al- Attassi, who already had behind him two stints in power as president and two as prime minister. In 1955 he was replaced by that old favorite, Shukri al-Quwatli.

Between 1946 and 1956, Syria had 20 governments and four florid constitutions.

In 1958 al-Quwatli amalgamated Syria with Egypt, forming the United Arab Republic. Formally Syria’s president was Egyptian Gamal Abdel-Nasser, whose 1956 defeat catapulted him to the status of a pan-Arab hero. Within a few weeks, al-Quwatli was betrayed, and his Damascus power base was usurped by Salah Bitar and Akram al-Hawrani. The latter was Nasser’s Syrian deputy, until they began to bicker. By 1959, al- Hawrani had to flee Syria.

In 1961 Abdel-Karim al-Nahlawi overthrew Nasser’s men in Damascus, and Syria became a separate entity once again, a fact that didn’t discourage Egypt from exploiting the UAR epithet till 1971.

Syria was now a Ba’ath stronghold, but different factions within that party battled each other with vengeance –literally. Nazim al-Qudsi was Syria’s first post-UAR president. Upon his removal, Luwai al-Attassi presided for four months till Amin al-Hafiz replaced him, ruling the roost from mid-1964 to early 1966, when Salah Jadid ousted Hafiz.

It’s roughly here that Ophir’s long lampoon ends, replete with many more names than mentioned above. In time, Jadid was booted out by Hafez Assad, and the epilogue is now unfolding before our credulous eyes.

Suffice it to note that the miscellaneous short-lived dictatorships served the interests of incompatible components of what’s misguidedly known as the Syrian nation. They all waxed ecstatic about democratic and reformist virtues.

Way back, though, no Israeli was naïve enough to take any of the ornate rhetoric seriously. Today, intellectually indolent molders of public opinion – smugly dismissive of the lessons of history – not only fall for the fallacy but excitedly hype it.

It’s little wonder that most of the international community has lost sight of what Syria was and still is. In the mix feature ignorance and fatigue, along with lots of economic and geopolitical interests. It was expedient for the world to turn a blind eye to truth. For us here, however, it was nothing but unimaginable folly. We should know better – if only because of proximity and because our self-preservation concerns behoove us not to disregard reality.

But Hafez Assad’s Yom Kippur War record, sponsorship of terror and patronage of Hezbollah were obstinately overlooked. Israeli governments hankered after a deal with the same Assad who, when he served as defense minister in 1966, addressed Israelis and blustered belligerently: “We shall never call for nor accept peace. We shall only accept war. We have resolved to drench this land with your blood, to oust you aggressors, to throw you into the sea.”

Assad never took back these words nor so much as pretended to have softened. Unsurprisingly, White House residents and perfidious Europeans pressured little unloved Israel to indulge the Damascus despot by inordinately imperiling the Jewish state’s survival prospects.

Predictably, Israel’s own priests of pragmatism rushed with alacrity to ingratiate themselves and decree that by ceding the Golan to benign Syrian rule, we’d be blessed with blissful coexistence.

This encapsulated the homegrown omniscients’ dalliance with Assad-the-father. Staggeringly, their enthusiasm for concessions soared after he went the way of all flesh and his son inherited the blood-stained Assad mantle.

Our in-house experts uncannily perceived the agreeable aspect of Bashar, the lanky ophthalmologist with a supposed Western orientation. Bashar, we were tirelessly preached to by retreat-promoters, looks less totalitarian than his dad. He’s just the gawky guy next door who might make a nifty neighbor if we only try hard enough to win him over.

Yet, confoundingly, life refuses to mesh with established Israeli wishful thinking. Much to the embarrassment of our indefatigable deal-peddlers, Bashar’s own citizenry is exceedingly less mesmerized by him than his Israeli boosters were until quite recently.

There’s no getting away from the fact that paying off dictators to secure a semblance of accommodation is a losing proposition, because eventually dictators disappear. With them vanishes the peace we’re required to fork out for. There’s no Better Business Bureau or Customer Service to refund Israel’s hefty, tangible and eminently risky investment in land-for-peace fantasies.

Thank heaven the Golan is still ours – a buffer between our small sliver of a state and the Syrian mayhem. Imagine our misfortune if Assad’s tanks were parked on the shores of Lake Kinneret.

Those who insistently brainwashed us that this is what’s prescribed for our national well-being should atone for their sins by memorizing Ophir’s skit and performing it daily in central city squares. Our street corners should again resonate with cadenced renditions of “Adib Shishakli and Shukri al-Quwatli….”

Hopscotch and jump-rope are optional.

Thus – ignominiously and brutally – ended the tempestuous 57-year life of a strong-willed woman, exceptionally independent and nonconformist for her time. In Western cultural enclaves, she’s sporadically remembered (in books, plays and films) for her affair with one of the fathers of psychoanalysis, Carl Jung.

It was a big deal back in the early years of the 20th century, when she lived in Germany, Switzerland and Austria. It was a case of opposites attracting. Jung, an unabashed anti-Semite, was both enticed by the spirited petite and repelled by her Jewishness. She was mesmerized by his Aryan looks and fantasized about a love-child in whom the best of the Jewish and Aryan would splendidly combine.

Sigmund Freud, whose great break with Jung was sparked – among other causes – by this liaison, wrote to Sabine: “You must learn to discern the difference between friends and enemies (I mean Jung).”

In 1911 Sabine had settled down and married a Jewish physician from Russia, Pavel Scheftel. She returned with him to Moscow in 1923 and then moved back to her native Rostov. In 1936 the regime outlawed psychoanalysis, closed down her psychiatric clinic and seized the family’s property. Pavel died in 1937 during Stalin’s “Great Terror,” and Sabine’s three brothers, all noted academicians, also perished in those purges.

When invading Nazi forces occupied Rostov, Sabine said: “I know Germans, they are a civilized nation. They are not capable of evil deeds.”

Today astonishingly little is known in her native land about Freud’s disciple and the founder of psychoanalysis in Russia. It’s as if she never existed. But her elimination from Russian collective memory, only underscores Sabine’s Jewish lot.

After the Soviet Union’s fall, the Russian Jewish Congress put up a plaque commemorating Jewish victims at the Zmiyevskaya Balka mass grave of 27,000 – known as Russia’s Babi Yar. That plaque was recently removed and arbitrarily replaced with a new marker, which, in the style of the defunct USSR, identifies the dead only as “peaceful citizens of Rostov-on- Don and Soviet prisoners-of-war.”

No rationale is given for why certain Soviet citizens were targeted by the Nazis. Moreover, no mention is made of slain Jewish refugees from Poland, who were decidedly not Soviet citizens. It’s as if Jews were never there and none were annihilated because of their Jewishness.

This isn’t an instance of localized hardheartedness.

It’s commonplace throughout the former USSR, and not only in Russia. Its roots reach deep and explain as much about today’s Russia as about past Soviet idiosyncrasies and why they persist.

The Soviets spawned their own singular version of Holocaust-denial. They didn’t deny the carnage; they merely obfuscated the identity of whom Hitler singled out for systematic extermination. Thus according to the official Soviet version, there never was specific anti-Jewish butchery in Nazi-ruled Soviet territory. There was heroic resistance against German occupiers in which Soviet citizens were callously massacred.

The distinct Jewish tragedy is obscured by submerging it in the overall wartime narrative (which fails to dwell on the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact).

Little wonder, then, that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas (Abu-Mazen) authored his Holocaust-denial treatise at Moscow’s communist-era Russian University for Friendship between People (a.k.a. the People’s Friendship University of Russia, also a.k.a. the Patrice Lumumba Friendship University).

There Abbas specialized in revising history, an endeavor that in 1982 ripened into a PhD dissertation that both denied the Holocaust and yet blamed Zionists for it. Two years later, Dr. Abbas further expanded and embellished his “research.” He never apologized or retracted a single nuance of his learned thesis. Neither did today’s Russia ever censure the state-sanctioned fraud.

The mendacity lives on.

Abbas personally and the PA media he controls consistently glorify terrorist atrocity-perpetrators, who with Nazi-like zeal lust after Jewish blood. Palestinian Media Watch, for example, revealed that Abbas’s PATV broadcast greetings and praise to the Fogel family’s slaughterers, tried and imprisoned in Israel.

Hakim Awad’s mother sent “greetings to dear Hakim, the apple of my eye, who carried out the operation in Itamar.” His aunt extolled “Hakim Awad, the hero, the legend.” The TV host effusively concurred.

Last March, Hakim and Amjad Awad invaded the Fogel home in Itamar and knifed to death a father, mother and three youngsters (aged 11, four and three-months). At the time, Russian-educated Abbas insisted Arabs were incapable of such bestiality. Yet now Abbas’s media turns convicted baby-killers into national heroes and role models.

But not only does Soviet-like duplicity endure and thrive in Abbas’s latifundia; it takes on sinister incarnations in Russia.

It was convenient at the height of the Cold War to ascribe Moscow’s malevolence solely to communist machinations. But communism is purportedly gone, while Russia tenaciously clings to the wrong side of history, as in its obdurate defense of Damascus despot Bashar Assad and its outright assistance in constructing Iran’s nuclear facilities, to say nothing of its ongoing opposition to stringent sanctions against Tehran’s nuke-craving ayatollahs.

This calls to mind USSR strategy before the June 22, 1941 monstrous German betrayal. Until then, the Russians ensconced themselves firmly on history’s wrong side.

Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov applauded the Third Reich’s conquest of Warsaw. The German invasions of Denmark and Norway caused him to “wish Germany complete success in these defensive measures.” Upon receiving news of the French collapse, Molotov conveyed “the warmest congratulations of the Soviet government on the splendid success of the German Wehrmacht.”

Putin’s Russia, despite its quasi-democratic façade, seems to harbor the same wrongheaded great-power aspirations as its Soviet predecessor. These had less to do with exporting communist ideology than with Russian nationalist ambitions.

The plain fact of the matter is that Russia still offers succor to the Jewish people’s worst enemies. It emits exceedingly troublesome vibes. It reverts to type – be it in critical geopolitical maneuverings or in just expunging the unique Jewish Holocaust from its chronicles. It’s in this inimical ambiance that the mass-murder of Jews at Zmiyevskaya Balka can be misrepresented.

Russian parliamentarian Tamara Pletneva condescendingly advises Jews to “forget the bitterness and live in peace…. The memorial should commemorate all the war victims…. So why single out Jews?”

Perhaps because the Nazis singled them out. Despite rampant Pletneva-type portrayals of yesteryear’s Jews as incidental victims and of present-day Jews as obsessively parochial, the only reason that Sabine and millions of fellow ill-fated Jews were put to death was that they were Jews.

In 1913, when Sabine was expecting her first child, Freud wrote her, expressing the hope that the baby “will develop into a stalwart Zionist.” He added: “We are and remain Jews. The others will only exploit us and will never understand or respect us.”

There is a message here for the Jewish state almost a century later.

Appearing in Ramallah on the Palestinian Authority’s

To preempt Israeli backlash, Tibi feigned innocence. The word shaheed, he averred, means a person “killed by the occupation.”

Yet in everyday Arabic, suicide-bombers and perpetrators of any bloodcurdling atrocity in Allah’s name are popularly dubbed shaheeds. The Palestinian Authority’s media, schools and mosques – all under professed moderate Mahmoud Abbas’s control – glorify shaheeds as models of emulation for all, from pint-sized preschoolers onward.

No Arab harbors doubt about what shaheed means. Thus Tibi winks to his Arab listeners, who understand him perfectly, while he disingenuously pretends otherwise to us.

Tibi isn’t alone. Jerusalem-based Muhammad Hussein, the PA’s mufti (appointed by no other than the aforementioned Abbas, a.k.a Abu Mazen), declared at Abbas’s own Fatah faction’s 47th anniversary rally in Jerusalem that religious salvation is impossible without first eliminating the Jews. His diatribe, citing the Hadith (sayings attributed to Islam’s progenitor Muhammad), was aired January 9 on PATV (controlled by Abbas).

“The Hour [of Resurrection] will not come until you fight the Jews,” Hussein railed. “The Jew will hide behind stones or trees. Then the stones or trees will call: ‘O Muslim, servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.’” But Hussein, who frequently refers to Jews as “Allah’s foes” and as “descendants of monkeys and pigs,” subsequently feigned innocence, insisting he was just quoting holy texts, which alas, “cannot be changed as they’re sacrosanct, noble and oblige every Muslim.”
The logical conclusion is that killing Jews is a hallowed religious commandment. As inveterate democrats, therefore, we cannot interfere with Hussein’s freedom of worship and assorted democratic rights.

Ditto for a whole host of Arab MKs, who enjoy all the Jewish state’s parliamentary perks, especially the freedom to thumb their noses at us in ways that wouldn’t be tolerated anywhere – certainly not in post-“Arab-Spring” Muslim strongholds, nor even in any Western democracy, never mind one embattled and struggling for survival.

Foremost among these MKs is Haneen Zoabi. She hobnobbed with Hamas leaders, praised them to the hilt, participated in the Mavi Marmara provocation of 2010, partied with terrorists released in the Schalit swap and authored an inflammatory forward to vehement Israel-basher Ben White’s latest book, Palestinians in Israel: Segregation, Discrimination and Democracy.

There she castigates Israel as a “colonialist racist project.” She explicitly applauds exploiting “the power inherent in democracy to undermine the moral and political legitimacy of Israel.”

Her previous pearls of wisdom include: “a Jewish state leads to the end of democracy”; “the largest threat to Zionism is democracy” and “to demand full civic and national equality is actually to demand the end of Zionism. So we don’t hate Zionism. Zionism hates democracy.”

Zoabi feigns innocence as a promoter of democracy. Her bottom line is that the disappearance of Israel as a Jewish state is democracy’s praiseworthy progressive objective. To oppose said objective is undemocratic.

Thus democracy is successfully assaulted by using the democratic idiom against it. Democrats fear raising a ruckus lest they be admonished for not being as self-destructively democratic as cynical anti-democrats oblige them to be. Willy-nilly, democrats turn into timid accomplices in their own destruction.

In 1946 George Orwell wrote an essay, “Politics and the English Language,” in which he highlighted the abuse of political terminology.

“The word Fascism has now no meaning,” he noted, “except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable.’ The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another… Statements like Marshal Pétain was a true patriot, The Soviet press is the freest in the world, The Catholic Church is opposed to persecution, are almost always made with intent to deceive.”

Zoabi, Tibi, Hussein and other fellow upholders of their democratic rights to bay for our blood, indeed all make ostensibly innocuous noises “with intent to deceive.”

More than it attests to our devotion to democracy, the fact that we keep tolerating Tibi and crew for so long attests to angst about being judged by our enemies as not suicidally democratic enough. Needless to stress, this aberration undermines Israel’s survival prospects – physical as well as democratic.

The incitement we stomach drives a dynamic. It radicalizes the Arab street within Israel proper. Radical anti-Zionism begets more radical anti-Zionism. Radical candidates radicalize their electorate, which in turn makes radical rhetoric an indispensable vote-getter in the Arab sector. This vicious cycle hinges on our broadmindedness.

While we effuse self-congratulation for exceptionally enlightened liberalism, a momentum that exploits our liberality agitates for our extinction. Our forbearance confers legitimacy upon it.

The mufti who merely quoted his prophet’s exhortation to slay us won’t be indicted. He won’t be pilloried as was once-obscure rabbi Yitzhak Shapira, whose esoteric booklet on rules of warfare, Torat Hamelech, catapulted him to notoriety. Only Jews are censured.

Consistently, we play along with our worst enemies by abetting their slander merely to look liberal. This makes Jew-revulsion the badge of open-mindedness, justly deserving of protection under the right of free expression.

Conversely, Jewish resentment of anti-Jewish hate becomes uncool fascist muzzling of honorable opponents of fascism. The very term anti-Semitic is no longer politically correct because no one is quicker than anti-Semites to deny anti-Semitic motives.

Today’s anti-Semites are remarkably practiced in accompanying their invective with instant disclaimers – by now an expected part of the pattern. They bristle with righteous indignation at the very suggestion that hating us might imply anti-Semitism.

Heaven forfend we foolhardily stray into that semantic minefield. Equally rash is to dare bring up the Holocaust. That invariably occasions Judeophobic jeers, which discomfit us.

Also to be avoided is reference to any of the ghastly massacres perpetrated by Arabs against Jews throughout the 20th century. Numerous horrific episodes occurred before there even was Jewish sovereignty to fulminate against, to say nothing of the “occupation” that resulted from the 1967 war.

The Arabs instigated that war in order, as they said (back then without sly verbal artifice), to eradicate us, throw us into the sea, pulverize us to dust, incinerate us to ashes, reduce us to skeletal remains that would litter the Judenrein streets of Tel Aviv. Genocidal sentiments inspired ghoulish political cartoons rampant in Arab journals on the Six Day War’s eve. That, however, was when our would-be annihilators fully expected victory, before they were thwarted and thereupon pronounced themselves pitiable hapless victims without an unkind thought among them.

But such reminiscences are so yesterday, uncool and politically incorrect. The prevailing bon ton behooves us to erase from our minds any memory of Arabs plotting genocide in 1967. It’s patently indecorous in polite society to mention that the Arabs – far from being victims – were the aggressors, that they still are, that they feign innocence, that they pose as democracy’s champions with intent to deceive.

“The result is that you’re not fighting him, but yourself. You always come to a stalemate. Every time you think of a move, you think of a perfect defense. The best fighters don’t worry about what the other man may do.”

Words to live by – unless, like America’s current commander-in-chief, the last thing you want is to conceive of yourself as a fighter.

Clearly, President Barack Obama didn’t attend the Perry Mason School of Law. Instead he honed his attitudes at Harvard Law. It’s a crucial difference – quite possibly the single biggest danger to global peace and, most immediately and acutely, to Israel.

Regardless of whether he lacks the intellectual integrity to unfetter himself from what was inculcated into him or whether he cannot resist the expediency of exploiting superficial truisms for political ends, Obama appears to expect all international arena players to abide by Harvard conventions. All are required to non-judgmentally tolerate adversarial viewpoints, to submit a priori that no cause is unavoidably more just than any other and to effectively prefer Third World ostensible underdogs with a peeve.

My country, Obama was taught at Harvard, isn’t necessarily more right, democracy isn’t necessarily democratic or superior and belligerents can be soothed with sufficient sympathy, flattery and concessions. Obama’s 2009 tour de force at Cairo University epitomized the ethos of post-hippie-era Harvard.

Its bottom line is that fanatics like Iran’s ayatollahs or the Muslim Brotherhood have compelling grievances and that it behooves us to see things through their eyes. This would, in theory, enable us to get a feel for their strategy and anticipate their tactical moves. They’d thereby be humanized in our view, the fear factor would abate and levelheaded accommodation would ensue.

So while Obama ups his anti-Iranian nukes rhetoric, he simultaneously escalates his pressure to prevent Israel from launching a preemptive operation against Tehran’s nuclear facilities. Despite years of Israel warning and Washington dithering, the plain fact of the matter is that not much has changed. Israel still warns and Obamaesque Washington still dithers.

Despite a tough Senate sanctions bill, Obama is loath to fully impose it. He still palavers about that elusive international coalition to browbeat Iran, although it cannot evade the cognizance of even his most starry-eyed spinmeisters that Russia, China and assorted hangers-on won’t do their utmost to foil Iranian nuclear ambitions (that is, if they at all go through the motions).

Why, then, would the ayatollahs see reason, as Obama supposes they should? Iran consistently receives indications that it isn’t obliged to mend its thuggish ways.

For example, when Obama’s top defense officials underscore the negative consequences of resorting to military means, the Iranians get a message diametrically contradictory to the one Obama insists he’s sending. Rather than abide by his Harvard guidelines, the Iranians deduce that they can proceed with impunity to make whatever mischief strikes their fancy – nuclear or otherwise.

It boggles the mind that at this exceedingly late stage the delusion still persists that Iran can be somehow dissuaded from its nefarious plots, that it’ll be wowed by dynamic diplomacy and see last-minute sense.

Obama may have been given a stick by America’s legislators but he’s hesitant to wield it. He’s still trying to figure out what Ahmadinejad is going to do, which, as per Perry Mason’s insightful observation, means that Obama subconsciously strives to envisage what he’d do in Ahmadinejad’s place.

Here, however, the result isn’t a stalemate because the Iranian bomb becomes a more potent threat with each wasted day. Counting on a miraculous Iranian epiphany is as far-sighted as believing in the blossoming of the Arab spring that has so far only sprouted Muslim Brotherhood weeds throughout the region.

Rarefied Harvard moral relativism, though, can portray invasive noxious weeds as desirable fragrant roses. And so Obama rationalizes that the Brotherhood (its rabidly pro-Nazi roots dismissed from mind) could well become the nurturer of the tardy flowering of democracy and civil liberties in the Arab sphere.

His secretary of state Hillary Clinton confirmed reports that the Obama administration would work with ascendant Islamist parties in the Muslim world.

She’s willing to do business with the infidel- bashers, arguing that they might not be quite as bad as depicted by their deposed antagonists: “For years, dictators told their people they had to accept the autocrats they knew in order to avoid the extremists they feared. Too often we accepted the narrative ourselves.”

The line now is that moderate Islamists comprise the Brotherhood’s mainstream, that they can be counted upon to conduct a sane foreign policy, uphold the rights of women and religious minorities and justify Obama’s Harvard hopes.

They probably will. Just like Tehran’s ayatollahs did.

This is painfully reminiscent of Neville Chamberlain’s foreign secretary Lord Halifax, one of the prime architects of appeasement, who signaled Hitler that German designs on Austria, chunks of Czechoslovakia and Poland weren’t altogether unpalatable to British tastes, so long as German territorial expansion was “peaceful.”

Only after the Axis bully began misbehaving with particular impudence following 1938’s Munich pact did Halifax finally work out that this wasn’t quite cricket. But to his credit Halifax did agonize, even if belatedly, and he did draw some extremely cogent conclusions. “I often think how much easier the world would have been to manage,” he mused, “if Herr Hitler and Signor Mussolini had been at Oxford.”

But they weren’t – just as the entire Middle Eastern coterie of baddies never imbibed Harvard liberalism. However, nothing suits these jihadists better than a leader of the free world who so dutifully complies with Harvard rules. So what if he assumes that they would too. Let him. They’ll do as they please, undeterred because he’s Harvard-bound to consider their perspective.

Israel, in contrast, is ineligible for similar indulgence and is slated to pay the price for Obama’s broadmindedness toward our region’s Muslim warlords.

The onus for quelling the chaos isn’t on the merchants of mass-murder but on Israel.

While Israel doesn’t ask that a single US soldier lay his life on the line for it, neither should Israel’s elected leaders be subjected to diktats whereby they must suppliantly seek permission to save Israel from annihilation. No Israeli government was elected to preside over another Holocaust.

That’s why the Jewish state’s coalition and opposition both must memorize Perry Mason’s precept.

Obama might kid himself that he’s playing for time till after November’s Election Day. Only by then, all bets will likely be off. Obama’s inaction inexorably pushes Israel to the desperate unilateral action it itself is leery of. We cannot remain pawns in Obama’s gamble that Ahmadinejad can be converted to Harvard niceties. Or as Perry Mason reiterated: “You can’t sit back and wait for things to happen to you.”

Existential dangers that can’t be eradicated in one simplistic swoop are a drag. Admitting that some problems are altogether intractable can be oppressive, especially to generations reared on the 45- minute TV plot where everything is fixable in a tight time frame. Life’s burdens would diminish if reality only conformed to Hollywood scripts.

Given that, there’s just no denying that the ultimate candidate for prime minister of Israel is none other than Ziva David – the boob tube’s outstanding Israeli patriot, a self-disciplined and self-reliant Zionist warrior, a virtual one-woman army and a sharpshooter guided by an unerring moral compass.

She’s quite possibly the only Jewish regular on American TV who’s unapologetic, complex-free and not comically dysfunctional. She’s surely the only full-time Israeli character on any mainstream network hit drama.

Indeed, NCIS’s Ziva is probably the only positive Israeli sort on the screen anywhere. Sexy, brave, accomplished (fluent in 10 languages, even if she can’t get her English idioms quite right), she’s without an image handicap (save for her daredevil driving). She’s definitely one with whom typical Israelis can proudly identify – mostly because Ziva is proud of being Israeli.

And since in our day, charismatic media stars apparently constitute sought-after political saviors, why not Ziva? Who’s better? Her fetching features should make her a shoo-in.

So what if she’s not real?

So what if she’s actually played by Chilean actress Coté de Pablo?

Perhaps Coté, inspired by her alter ego’s ideals, would make aliya (actually the name of a 2009 NCIS episode). She’d be wildly popular here, to the point of being egged on to set up her own overnight wonder-party and becoming our hottest vote-magnet.

We go big-time for the pretty-face celebrity, for the façade, for the contrived superficial suave charmer, for the unreal. Just look at the fuss churned up by Yair Lapid, one of the more vacuous TV anchors and vapid columnists.

Yet for years, speculation was rife about his imminent jump into the political fray. Indeed, no sooner had he tossed his hat into the ring than polls promised his yet-to-be-established party 20 Knesset seats. Please note: That’s when none of us can come close to pinpointing what he stands for, what he opposes, who his running mates would be, on what platform they’d campaign and even under what name they’d field their winning ticket.

That feat calls to mind what Shmuel Flatto-Sharon achieved back in 1977 when he ran for the Knesset on his lonesome and, although an unknown, garnered enough votes for two parliamentary seats – only he omitted to put together a candidates’ list. Equally amazing was Rafi Eitan’s ultimate joke of 2006 – the Pensioners list, which ushered seven elderly UFOs into our parliament, courtesy of faddish ballot-box hijinks by first-time voters.

Yair’s own father, the late Yosef “Tommy” Lapid – who, unlike his son, was a real journalist – also spawned a short-lived political marvel, Shinui, buoyed by anti-religious fervor that was proclaimed the cure-all for all that ailed us collectively.

The elder Lapid, a renowned epicure, habitually effused passion about such pressing predicaments as 5-percent cottage cheese. He assiduously denigrated dairy products with below a 9% fat content. But Tommy at least boasted genuine withering wit and a piquant humor unique to Hungarian-speakers like himself.

Not so Yair. He’s frankly bland with an assiduously obscured agenda. Conventional wisdom places him in the indeterminate political middle. In other words, his opinions represent supreme virtue by virtue of not representing much of anything.

We’re yet to hear something unambiguous from him, which is geared to endear him to every Jewish mother and her voting-age daughter. Saying nothing to all people advantageously ensconces our latest political headliner somewhere in mid-consensus. Those who won’t flock to that indistinct, nondescript space are perforce disparaged as fanatics.

Tempting as it is to malign those unafraid to take a stand as rabid, fiery-eyed nutcases (foaming at the mouth for good measure), some upright rightist and some laudable leftist choices saved the day at given junctures in human annals. There can be a cool-headed, rational Right and non-doctrinaire, non-demagogic Left. What lies between isn’t conclusively better as much as it’s a cop-out.

The dictionary definition of the latter noun is “an evasion; an excuse for inaction.” Its verb form is defined as “to avoid trouble and responsibility, evade an issue or problem, disengage oneself.” The cop-out’s promoters equate it with moderation, which can sometimes be the case but not necessarily so. Moderation itself isn’t what we should automatically hail as creditable and dependable. It may work in certain circumstances but bomb in others. Moderation, moreover, isn’t inexorably synonymous with pragmatism.

And pragmatism isn’t always wise and mustn’t be confused with levelheadedness. History is replete with examples of calamitous and cowardly choices paraded as pragmatic. Conversely sometimes bold, nonconformist and unfashionable responses prove in retrospect to have been truly pragmatic.

Lapid not only covets “middle-of-the-roader,” “moderate” and “pragmatist” epithets, but he cunningly smudges their distinctions, jumbles them together and then markets the mishmash to the undiscriminating as incomparably sound and sensible. His non-message impresses those too trendily uncritical or clueless enough to overlook all past precedents in which acclaimed middle grounds became vast killing fields. Centrism isn’t perforce the product of sober analysis. Repeatedly it’s a dithering escape from resolve.

But that hardly bothers most of those who now cheer the dashing know-it-all with the cool streaks of gray in his coiffure and a grin to rival George Clooney’s. It’s patently indisputable: Yair is gorgeous, even if we can’t quite home in on how that qualifies him for leading the nation through some of the nastiest challenges it ever faced.

If a polished TV persona is all it takes to run for PM, then why not Ziva/Coté? True, she still lacks critical exposure in this country. NCIS – the most Israel-friendly series in television history – isn’t shown here (perhaps, alas, precisely because it’s too Israel-friendly for our post-Zionist opinion-molders). But that can be rectified. Intensive transfusions of reruns should even the scales and make Ziva a local heroine.

Not only are her dark good looks reminiscent of Yair’s, but she, too, has a famous father, albeit fictional (her dad, Eli David, is the Mossad’s chief). As Yair currently illustrates, it’s not necessarily a drawback if an aspiring politico’s drawing power is contingent on imaginary strengths.

Hence, Yair is certainly no less preposterous a choice than whole-cloth Ziva. Backing him is as rational as backing her. Besides, she has sterling support. While Yair’s bosom buddy is ex-prime minister Ehud Olmert, Ziva has earned the allegiance of none other than Leroy Jethro Gibbs, her NCIS boss.

Portrayed by Mark Harmon, Gibbs is way handsomer than Olmert and is stoically incorruptible. Most important of all, unlike Olmert, he’d never declare: “We are tired of fighting; we are tired of being courageous; we are tired of winning; we are tired of defeating our enemies.”

Those of us who remember this country a little further back than the day before yesterday know that given anti-Zionist ultra-Orthodox elements habitually sought to stoke the fires of contention. Their counterparts on the leftist fringes of our political patchwork were equally eager to fan the flames. For the latter, it’s politically expedient to ignite culture wars and lump the entire complex gamut of Israel’s observant Jews under the single, all-inclusive epithet of haredim (God-fearing).

The religious zealot who called a female soldier “pritzeh” (Yiddish for a woman of loose morals) was turned into a sectarian martyr when the prosecution – generally renowned for its languor and lenient plea bargains – charged him with no less than sexual harassment. The outsized photo of the secularist heroine in khaki, posing with self-important indignation, became the obligatory front-page feature for all tabloids.

And this brings us back to Shaham.

Exuding holier-than-thou mannerisms, he appeared before the press and in measured tones – pious eyes all but rolling skyward – wished that “the rabbis would condemn this. The rabbis can put a stop to it all.”

Since plenty of rabbis commented quite unambiguously, this leaves us with a choice of two conclusions about Shaham. Either he’s clueless about the communities under his jurisdiction, or he’s an out-and-out hypocrite. Ignorant or disingenuous, it’s a cheerless bottom line.

No single spiritual authority sways the weird and anarchic groupings in Shaham’s bailiwick. These, by tradition, rival each other unrestrainedly. Indeed, most any rabbi’s reproof is sure to trigger in-your-face provocative escalation from his wild-bunch opponents in given diminutive enclaves of Mea She’arim and its Beit Shemesh spillover. It boggles the mind that a Jerusalem police chief wouldn’t know this (or that he’d pretend not to).

But it takes the cake for Shaham, of all people, to posture as the voice of moderation, appealing for decorum and tolerance. He’s hardly the poster-child for fair play and self-discipline. Have the sands of time truly buried Shaham’s own transgressions? Or does his proven relish for battering political opponents confer immunity upon him?

Enticing though selective amnesia may be, let’s just the same revisit conduct of our capital’s No. 1 law-enforcer. For those who may have forgotten (not too unpredictably, because tendentious scribblers and broadcasters hardly harped on the issue), here’s a brief reminder.

During the 2005 pre-disengagement mass-rally in Kfar Maimon, then-Negev District commander Shaham affected his most macho pose for TV crews, well aware that the commands he barked to young subordinates would be widely broadcast. That suited him perfectly – televised exposure might impress prime minister Ariel Sharon. A hefty professional advancement seemed in the bag.

And so hectored Shaham for all to hear: “I want arrests, and I tell you to use water cannons unconditionally. Don’t call me. Go for the water cannons. I know these haredim. Shit upon them. They should burn. Don’t reassess – use water cannons and clubs. Hit them hard on the lower parts of the body. Work as you know how. I’m an expert in handling these haredim.”

Shaham proceeded to boast before the entire watching nation that he was braver than his own superiors, who had advised him not to charge into Kfar Maimon.

Shaham’s reply: “I’m not some whore who opens her legs and waits for someone to come in. You can bank on my ability to open their [the protesters’] legs. I’ll f**k their mother’s mother. Now go tell your buddies… not just a few beatings. I’m telling you all this to spare you the need to seek authorization.”

Later, under pressure and to avoid greater repercussions than a feeble reprimand, Shaham issued a wan statement of regret, claiming he had been overwrought. That – unsurprisingly – sufficed in 2007 for a three-judge Supreme Court panel to reject petitions against his then-new appointment to the post of Jerusalem deputy police commissioner. The petitioners wondered what the reaction would have been had Shaham’s expletives been directed at Arabs rather than haredim.

But the court condemned the petitioners for “seeking to ostracize a valued police officer because of one slip of the tongue, for which he tendered apology.”

More recently, Shaham was promoted to Jerusalem District commissioner. Why not? It had already been amply established by the highest court in the land that his bias and obscenities were no impediments.

Regardless of our unqualified rejection of gender-exclusion and linked excesses in Jerusalem and its zany environs, we need to keep in mind the excesses of those entrusted to safeguard what we broadly all recognize as justice. It cannot be that one man’s shout of “pritzeh” would outweigh a leading officer of the law aggressively sending his underlings to f**k the haredim’s mothers’ mothers.

Making it worse is that anti-disengagement activists were nothing like Jerusalem’s current headline- generators. But distorting generalizations are the enlightened bon ton. Never mind that the “public enemies” the media reviles obsessively – settlers and Mea She’arim militants – occupy diametrically opposite ends of Israel’s spectrum.

Super-patriot settlers and their supporters are avid, if frustrated, Zionists. The bus-segregationists are passionate anti-Zionists. Way back, the differences among Israel’s religious Jews weren’t deliberately obfuscated, perhaps because in the days of Labor hegemony, it was in nobody’s interest to tar entire communities with the same brush.

We understood that anti-Zionists excoriated renascent Jewish sovereignty because the state’s founders didn’t wait for the Messiah. We realized the Messiah’s apostles mostly hailed from among Mea She’arim’s Natorei Karta segment, whose most fervent fanatic confederates were members of the uncompromising hassidic branch that emerged from the former Hungarian town of Satmar (now Romania’s Satu Mare).

They themselves chronically divide into inimical sub-sects, the most belligerent of which have always caused trouble – from the time they opposed a swimming pool in Jerusalem, to the time their then-leader Moshe Hirsch was appointed by Yasser Arafat as the PA’s “minister for Jewish affairs,” and all the way to the participation of several in Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s 2006 Holocaust-denial fest in Tehran (only to be shunned later even by their own families).

Shaham ought to know that generic rabbis cannot dictate to these cyclically splintering clusters, who confrontationally foment adversity among their nearest and dearest over hairsplitting nuances. They aren’t the greatest danger to our societal fiber because they essentially reside outside our society – to the extent of even refusing any welfare services from the state they abhor.

Offensive placards always proliferated in Natorei Karta neighborhoods, but yesteryear’s mainstream was amused by the exotica and didn’t elevate it to existential-menace proportions.

Proportions are paramount. It’s dangerous to blow things out of all proportion or, conversely, to lose our collective sense of proportion by pooh-poohing vituperative prejudice. Supposed upholders of legality like vulgar Shaham make political hay by self-servingly inflaming communal strife. They do well for themselves out of making things worse for everyone else.

TV anchors and scribblers worldwide fell for his consummate act and expressed solemn appreciation for the affectation. Critical appraisal was conspicuously absent.

Abbas – the on-and-off and now on-again political ally of Hamas and Islamic Jihad – took great pains to quasi-usurp Christmas from Christendom and impart the impression that Christmas is intrinsically also a Muslim celebration, “a Palestinian holiday” from which bogeymen Jews alone deserve exclusion.

Significantly this aroused no protests – the subjugation of Christians in Muslim societies, and foremost in Bethlehem, notwithstanding.

This supposed Christian-Muslim front comprised the gist of the homily delivered by the Mideast’s most senior Roman Catholic, Patriarch of Jerusalem Fuad al-Tuwal, a Jordanian Arab.

He effusively welcomed Abbas, congratulating him for “his unfaltering efforts to achieve a just peace in the Middle East, a main thrust of which is the creation of a Palestinian State.” The patriarch commiserated with the Palestinians, who “recently turned to the UN in the hope of finding a just solution.” According to his monologue, “they were asked to reengage in a failed peace process,” which “has left a bitter taste of broken promises and of mistrust.”

And guess who embittered the pitiable Palestinians? Guess who cast a dark, sinister shadow over their Muslim Christmas? Those Jews, of course. Who else?

Living up to the ecclesiastical hype, Abbas wished the worshipers “love and peace” and, presumably in that spirit, proceeded to slam Jewish settlements as “immoral and indefensible.”

“I wish for the Palestinian people that next year will be the year that peace will be implemented in the occupied Palestinian lands,” he said. “We, my brothers, believe in peace and are working to implement peace.”

Had any further elucidation been needed about his concept of peace, Abbas furnished it pre-Christmas when traveling to Ankara to shower affection upon the convicted terrorists deported to Turkey as part of the Gilad Schalit swap.

Outstanding among them was Amna Muna – tangible proof that evil can come in attractive guises. Abbas hugged her warmly and sat down for a chummy chat, not to mention his hefty financial reward.

Muna was actually supposed to be released into Gaza, but refused, citing her secularism as problematic in the Hamas fiefdom. In actual fact, though, she feared retribution.

This insolently unrepentant and most aggressive despot of the women’s prison security wing tortured noncompliant fellow inmates by, among other means, pouring boiling oil and wax on them.

Turkey was understandably her preferred destination. She now plies the school-lecture circuit there, vowing to return to active “combat against the Zionists” and exhorting pupils to become shahids (martyrs).

Muna – for those who forgot – is the fetching Fatah operative who via Internet contact lured 16-year-old Ophir Rahum to a cruel death on January 17, 2001. In a way, her atrocity is even more gruesome than the more common forms of Arab-inspired carnage. She might not have claimed as many lives as some of her compatriots, but what she did was spine-chillingly up-front and personal.

She schemed to get her hands on a Jewish kid, chose her victim with coldblooded deliberation, falsely befriended him and lured him in a premeditated hunting expedition that began long before 20 AK-47 bullets riddled Ophir’s young body.

The homicide was meticulously and maliciously plotted and executed painstakingly over months, in scrupulously calculated phases, to wrest an unsuspecting boy from his protective environment and trick him into a rendezvous with a hail of bullets.

Ophir yearned to make love not war. He embodied the shared Israeli dream of peace and bliss. With stars in his eyes, he was enticed. He wanted to believe the pretty decoy who flirted with him, the sly impostor who posed as “Sally.”

The striking seductress arranged to meet the smitten schoolboy. He traveled from Ashkelon to Jerusalem; she picked him up at the bus stop and drove him away. Eventually her accomplices shot his kneecaps and she, as per her own crowing account, stood there, taunting him and cackling mirthfully as he screamed in pain before being put to death. She still often derisively mimics his last cries.

One would expect that Abbas, feted abroad as the prince of moderation, would at least wash his hands of murderous Muna and condemn her unequivocally. Instead, this supposed man of peace has made Muna his Ramallah regime’s poster-child – the object of reverence and compassion, and a model for emulation.

That speaks volumes, because the lionized icon’s underlying moral code inevitably characterizes the collective that sponsors and supports her.

The Turkish get-together wasn’t Abbas’s first public embrace for Muna. It wasn’t inadvertent, nor was it an isolated, inconsequential political gesture. It was preceded by accolades aplenty.

In 2008, for instance, Abbas handpicked five female recipients for the PLO’s highest medal of heroism – the al-Quds Mark of Honor. All the women he named were then behind Israeli bars. This was touted as “a humanitarian gesture,” geared to highlight their “sacrifice and suffering as Israel’s captives, to raise their morale and pay tribute to them.”

The five included Ahlam Tamimi, pivotal in the August 9, 2001, atrocity at Jerusalem’s Sbarro Pizzeria. She escorted the suicide bomber to the eatery where he killed 15 persons, including seven children and five members of a single family. Muna, too, starred among Abbas’s designated heroines.

Predictably the international community made no fuss about Abbas’s choices. Neither did Israel’s own left wing.

Apparently, when chronic peaceniks have nobody to appoint as their interlocutor, they pretend that the hypothetical lesser evil is humanity’s great hope for the greater good.

Yet by paying lavish homage to child-slayers, Abbas endorses terror and escalates Palestinian psychological warfare, which – in order to manipulatively tug at the heartstrings of progressive do-gooders – camouflages mass-murderers as prisoners of conscience, persecuted altruists and vindictively incarcerated political philosophers.

Abbas cunningly postures as Israel’s hapless victim, as a saint on the side of the angels, indeed as a victim of terrorism rather than its devious promoter. His heart is artlessly in the right place. He seeks to do the right thing – which he would sincerely do, were it not for those obstructionist Israelis.

Doesn’t Abbas, after all, respectfully promise on every occasion to quell incitement within his latifundia?

Seemingly in the enlightened vanguard of the global good-guy brigade, Abbas convinces willingly gullible saps of what they’re anyway predisposed to imbibe. The watching world voluntarily laps up his fabrications and encouragingly promotes the PA figurehead’s deception.

However, the inescapable subtext of glorifying Muna is that her crime is Abbas’s true ideal – his prescription for all Israelis. In a better world, this truth wouldn’t be eclipsed by the sanctimonious chatter of the charming charlatan, seemingly spellbound by Christmas in the Church of the Nativity.

Muna is the benchmark of popular Palestinian intentions toward all Israelis. That’s why Abbas acclaims her malevolence instead of denouncing it, instead of beating his own breast for sanctioning and commissioning her bloodlust.

One day Cookie announced assertively that “all Jews have banana noses.” Uninitiated in the irrationalism of stereotyping, I rose to the defense of our tribe: “Oh yeah? How come my nose isn’t like that?” Cookie shot back without hesitation: “Coz you’re not Jewish.”

“Yes I am,” I replied defiantly.

“No, you’re not,” she insisted. “You got freckles.”

I was stumped and all I could come up with was “Huh, what’s that got to do with anything?”

I found myself asking that very same question, with as much bewilderment, after the current White House resident informed the whole world about his daughter Malia’s busy schedule on the bar/bat mitzvah circuit. That was somehow supposed to prove that Obama is the most pro-Israel president ever, endear him to American-Jewish hearts and win him political support, campaign contributions and crucial votes.

But, as with Cookie’s kooky argumentation, I couldn’t find the connection.

Malia’s dad pulled out all the stops when appearing at the recent Union for Reform Judaism Biennial in Maryland. His cliché-ridden routine wouldn’t have shamed any campy stand-up comedian in the intensely embarrassing era of Catskill overkill.

Nonetheless, Obama’s performance, demeaning and hackneyed though it was, went over big. It earned him no fewer than 70 rounds of rapturous applause. It dripped with schmaltz, served up liberally by Jewish speechwriters charged with dishing up smarmy tastelessness.

After effusive “Shabbat shalom” wishes, Obama chitchatted chummily: “My daughter Malia has reached the age where it seems like there’s always a bar or bat mitzvah – every weekend – and there is quite a bit of negotiations around the skirts that she wears at these bat mitzvahs. Do you guys have these conversations as well? All right. I just wanted to be clear it wasn’t just me. As a consequence, she’s become the family expert on Jewish tradition. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned from her, it’s that it never hurts to begin a speech by discussing the Torah portion. It doesn’t hurt,” Obama beamed, with a feigned Yiddish intonation.

Taking his daughter’s informed advice, he launched into a d’var Torah (Torah-based lecture), homing in on Joseph (as per that week’s Torah portion) and bizarrely repeating the word hineni (here I am) over and over and over, as if casting some cloying spell.

Other Hebrew words, like tikun olam (repairing the world), followed. That too went over big. Too much is never enough.

Then it got greasier yet: “when my Jewish friends tell me about their ancestors, I feel a connection. I know what it’s like to think, ‘Only in America is my story even possible.’”

Finally, Obama reached the wearisome issue of Israel: “As president, I have never wavered in pursuit of a just and lasting peace: two states for two peoples; an independent Palestine alongside a secure Jewish State of Israel. I have not wavered and will not waver. That is our shared vision.”

Doesn’t it sound nice? Obama self-servingly set out to make nice and since the “two-state solution” has been elevated to the status of an unassailable sacred dogma, commitment to it is hardly likely to antagonize his faithful followers.

To their ears it’s heresy to suggest that the last thing Palestinians want is a Palestinian state dwelling in idyllic coexistence alongside a secure, accepted and recognized Israel. Honchos in both Ramallah and Gaza may expediently exploit the two-state slogan, but they never truly espoused the cause of two-state harmony. Still, no unpleasant reality can spoil smug pageants far away from the real nastiness.

So Obama went on: “I know that many of you share my frustration sometimes, in terms of the state of the peace process. There’s so much work to do. But here’s what I know: there’s no question about how lasting peace will be achieved. Peace can’t be imposed from the outside. Ultimately, the Israelis and the Palestinians must reach agreement on the issues that divide them.”

Music to our ears – except that pressure can be exerted while being denied. The relentless pursuit of deals can mean relentlessly coercing Israel. It can mean sending Defense Secretary Leon Panetta to blame Israel for any impasse and bully it to “just get to the damn table.” It can mean Obama’s secretary of state trashing our democratic credentials.

But nothing like the above was mentioned – not a word on equating settlements with terrorist atrocities, on the equivocation vis-à-vis Iran, on Obama’s pro-Muslim predilections (beginning with his sycophantic 2009 Cairo speech and all the way to having NASA “reach out to dominantly Muslim countries”). Likewise omitted was the animus toward Israel’s elected government.

Significantly, only last month Obama failed to defend Binyamin Netanyahu when French President Nicolas Sarkozy branded him “a liar” during a conversation with Obama that was inadvertently broadcast to journalists during the G20 summit in Cannes.

“You’re fed up with him, but I have to deal with him even more often than you,” Obama bellyached. This latest incident merely underscored his unmistakable aversion as evidenced in the merciless protocol-abuse heaped on Netanyahu during his March 2010 visit.

Obama then snubbed Israel’s premier by walking out on him “to have dinner.”

This near-loathing wasn’t a negligible lapse of good manners and it wasn’t miraculously replaced overnight by a magnificent meeting of the minds. Everything remains as it was, but Obama’s aim is to make it seem that the rift never existed or, alternatively, that he healed it phenomenally.

The operative verb is “seem.” No real change had to take place, only to appear that it did.

American Jews (those who still care) need to ask themselves whether they aren’t falling for a false façade yet again when they applaud Obama’s bald-faced claim that “no US administration has done more in support of Israel’s security than ours. None. Don’t let anybody else tell you otherwise. It is a fact.”

Even Jewish liberals mesmerized by Obama’s apparent radicalism need ask themselves if it’s moral to judge us Israelis – to pretend to know better than we what’s best for us and to tell us to take existential risks. When all is said and done, it’s our lives on the line and no skin off American-Jewish noses.

That’s what ultimately matters and it has nothing to do with whether the Obama family’s “expert on Jewish tradition” is invited to bar mitzvahs and prattles about quoting pertinent Torah portions. Malia’s best friends may be Jewish but this doesn’t make her father our best bud. He may enunciate “hineni,” but this doesn’t attest to his goodwill toward the Jewish state.

Malia’s bat mitzvah fashion statements are about as relevant to Israel’s ongoing struggle for survival as my freckles were to Cookie’s contentions. The Jewish answer to Obama’s kitschy Catskill skit should be: “Huh, what’s that got to do with anything?”

Love and amity
Are signs of immaturity.
Mercy and all the rest
Are worthless relicts of the past.

One thing hasn’t lost its attraction:
That strange penchant for abomination…

Nothing here is smart or dumb,
Or logical, my chum –
So just hate wholeheartedly
So utterly impulsively.

Hefer’s insights into the compulsive nature of hate are remarkably borne out by the unbridled offensive of Peace Now Secretary-General Yariv Oppenheimer on Bank Leumi’s “Two Million Good Reasons” campaign. It set out to aid a broad variety of nonprofit organizations. The idea was for the public to vote online for its favorite among the 139 vying outfits – among them, alas, Im Tirtzu.

The top 10 were to receive bigger shares of the NIS 2 million set aside for grants, while lesser gifts would go to the next 50 contestants. To Oppenheimer’s consternation, it emerged that Im Tirtzu was a top contender. Im Tirtzu, it cannot be stressed enough, is an absolute anathema to the leftist Peace Now.

In its own words, Im Tirtzu is “an extra-parliamentary movement that works to strengthen and advance the values of Zionism in Israel… Im Tirtzu’s main objectives focus on working towards a renewal of the Zionist discourse… A major portion of Im Tirtzu’s efforts is devoted to combating the campaign of delegitimization against the State of Israel and to providing responses to Post-Zionist and Anti-Zionist phenomena.”

Im Tirtzu is Hebrew for “if you will.” These are the first words in Zionist visionary Theodor Herzl’s motto “If you will it, it is no fable.”

This NGO appeared likely to win second slot in the Bank Leumi competition. It’s a moot point whether what offended Oppenheimer more was proof of Im Tirtzu’s popularity or the apprehension that it might emerge marginally enriched (by anyhow paltry sums in comparison to the largesse lavished on the Israeli Left by EU governments with an eye to skew this country’s democratic processes).

Whatever it was, in the spirit of characteristic left-wing liberality, Oppenheimer set out to ban Im Tirtzu from the running.

He charged that Im Tirtzu was political (though it’s not affiliated with or funded by any party), that it was pushing a legislative agenda (just like an assortment of civic, women’s and animal protection groups in the race) and that Bank Leumi should have never allowed its participation.

To back his contentions Oppenheimer threatened to close down his account at the bank. In no time, more Peace Now adherents followed suit in phenomenally “spontaneous” uniformity and Bank Leumi was besieged with abusive e-mails, rife with expletives (as befit the enlightened ones), to say nothing of adjectives like “fascists” and “racists.”

The end was a foregone conclusion. Bank Leumi caved in and abrogated its philanthropic scheme. Im Tirtzu wasn’t the only victim. All sorts of worthy – and cash-strapped – NGOs lost out. Emboldened and unremorseful, Oppenheimer crowed. “We proved,” he boasted on Facebook, “that with determination and enormous public support it’s possible to launch moves and win.”

But this was no isolated angry crusade for Oppenheimer. He’s a hardened politician and a professional warrior. As preparations for disengagement were kicked into high gear in 2005, Oppenheimer shouted his blusterous battle cry: “We are ready for civil war.” He did so in rallies mounted by what presumptuously and pretentiously passed itself off as the “Majority Coalition,” and in front of numerous microphones and cameras.

No doubt, had the very same words been screamed out at a right-wing assembly it would have generated outraged indignation among Oppenheimer’s righteous sort and swiftly resulted in a great clamoring that the law be harshly laid down against the entire collective defamed as confrontation-mongering settler-insurrectionists.

But obviously different standards apply to Oppenheimer. Israeli justice cheats, peeks though its blindfold and allows the Oppenheimers in our midst to promote conflict with impunity.

When the Left goes on the warpath it’s always for peace, morality and virtue. Its self-proclaimed high-mindedness inevitably justifies any means. The few among us with historical memories still know about the Hapoel Squads that violently attacked new olim as they disembarked from their boats in Haifa Port throughout the 1930s. Those newcomers were Beitar sympathizers and therefore undesirable.

During World War II’s ominous prologue, when Europe’s desperate Jews frantically sought immigration visas (“certificates”) into Eretz Yisrael, the Left, which controlled the Jewish Agency, made sure that political rivals wouldn’t be granted legal aliya permits. And when these rivals attempted to get here in quasi-legal ways (like exploiting tourist and student visas or resorting to fictional marriages), leftist guardians of legality turned them in, often raiding buses and cafes to find folks without proper papers. At the time this gained infamy as “the hunt.”

It was a hunt in which yesteryear’s Left-led Yishuv establishment spared no hyperbole to denounce “illegals” because, being of the wrong political orientation and/or social class, they allegedly jeopardized the entire Zionist endeavor. The vituperative vocabulary the Left then unleashed on “unlicensed refugees” unmistakably calls to mind its anti-settler invective today.

As the “hunters” stalked their prey, the more militant Left, under the aegis of the Communist Peh-Kah-Peh (the Yiddish acronym for the Palestinisheh Kommunistisheh Partai) took the war for “justice and legality” a step further. It too wasn’t afraid of getting down and dirty. Immediately following the bloody Arab pogroms of April 1936, the PKP plastered local streets with posters demanding “the repeal of the Balfour Declaration and an end to Jewish immigration.” It opposed the construction of Tel Aviv harbor and repudiated each batch of new certificates issued.

Indeed, as Arab terror escalated, proof mounted of PKP collusion (in incidents such as the bombing of Haifa’s Beit Hapoalim and Tel Aviv’s Fairgrounds). When Arab leaders themselves announced a short-lived truce in the autumn of 1936, the PKP rejected any cease-fire on the grounds that “Zionism drags Jews to hell… Zionists and imperialists alone are to blame for these days of atrocity” – just as today’s settlers are likewise blamed.

The more things change the more they stay the same. In the name of unity and upholding the law, yesteryear’s Left delivered Revisionist underground fighters to hostile British hands in what came to be known as the “Saison” – the open hunting season. Alternatively, kibbutzniks captured Jewish opponents, imprisoning and even torturing them in the name of decency.

Oppenheimer, darn it, can’t duplicate such escapades, but he can snitch on settler caravans in the wilderness and paint Im Tirtzu as the foe, heaping more scorn on domestic political adversaries than on external genocidal enemies. In Hefer’s words, Oppenheimer can “hate wholeheartedly, so utterly impulsively.”

Hefer incidentally knew whereof he spoke. Back in the day, he vehemently railed against discontinuing the Saison. The claim that the Revisionists had been defeated, Hefer impassionedly warned, is premature:

Suddenly the scourge will arise
And spread like the plague…
Bring the Saison back,
Crush, beat, obliterate
To the last eradicate! 

None of this, incidentally, could be laid at the door of Binyamin Netanyahu’s demonic disrepute. Israel’s then-prime minister was Ehud Barak, whose electoral campaign was enthusiastically aided and abetted by Hillary’s own hubby.

But contrary to conventional wisdom, it never really matters much who’s in power in Jerusalem. Israel is always the regional bogeyman. And so, back in the good old days of post-Oslo Labor rule, America’s first lady, self-satisfied and basking in ultra-liberal sanctimony, smiled contentedly as Suha railed in indignation: “Our people have been subjected to the daily and extensive use of poisonous gas by the Israeli forces, which has led to an increase in cancer cases among women and children.”

No way could Hillary claim to have gotten the wrong end of the stick. She listened via simultaneous translation to Suha’s prepared script, accusing Israel – in genuine medieval well-poisoning tradition – of resorting to all manner of noxious concoctions to kill Arab women and tots (as distinct, presumably, from adult males).

Among its other sins, Hillary’s hostess charged, Israel deliberately contaminated with lethal toxins 80 percent of the water (not 79% or 81%) consumed by Palestinian females and infants.

Hillary listened to the calumny without a hint of displeasure. Indeed, she nodded approval from time to time, and when Suha concluded, Hillary embraced her warmly and planted affectionate kisses on her cheeks.

Thus, the uninitiated onlooker may be forgiven for assuming that Suha listed irrefutable grievances and that her claims won at least the tacit corroboration of her American guest. Significantly, even after the bizarre scene ended, Clinton never bothered to dispel that impression. This, however, should have come as no shocker to anyone familiar with her record.

Going back to the earliest stirrings of Hillary’s public-life debut, she treated the PLO as a hip revolutionary liberation movement, rather than as spearheading an Arab war to destroy the Jewish state. When she chaired the New World Foundation in the ’80s, she funneled finances to PLO subsidiaries. In 1998, she preceded Bill Clinton in unabashed advocacy of a Palestinian state.

So is it any surprise that, just as the Mideast is awash with reactionary Islamic-supremacist takeovers (cheered by the beguiled Free World as democratic uprisings), Secretary of State Clinton should choose to berate Israel’s treatment of women? Hardly.

She has certainly imbibed scraps of disjointed and tendentious information on our much-hyped in-house quarrels. Yet our boisterous debate, more than all else, attests to the vibrancy of our civil liberties rather than to their demise, as she disingenuously contended in her skewed monologue at the Brookings Institution’s Saban Center.

Clinton likened Israel to Iran after harping on controversies at the extreme-most fringes of our society, making them look like the mainstream. She omitted to mention that the mainstream is diametrically different. That is rank distortion.

The same goes for Clinton’s excoriation of legitimate Knesset legislative initiatives to limit the ability of foreign governments to derail our domestic democracy via financial largesse to various NGOs. All these outfits face is the loss of tax exemptions, which is hardly a mortal blow to freedom and certainly less than what the American law prescribes. But the truth, as was the case in Suha’s address, is immaterial – perhaps it’s altogether undesirable.

With doting chums like this secretary of state, it’s safe to deduce that we need no enemies in America’s corridors of power. But the really bad news is that pals like Hillary abound there. She is an authentic representative of her boss, President Barack Obama.

In his friendliest guise yet, he has just told Jewish campaign donors that he considers “no ally more important than the State of Israel” and that “Prime Minister Netanyahu knows he can count on the United States…. We will not abandon the pursuit of a just and lasting peace that will end the conflict.”

Yep, we got the message: Obama wants money and votes. Electioneering begets lots of brotherly blarney, but the devil is in the details. What’s a “just” peace, and what does its “pursuit” denote?

The answers were furnished by Obama’s defense secretary, Leon Panetta, at the same forum in which Clinton tongue-lashed the Mideast’s lone democracy. If Clinton defamed our democratic deportment, Panetta acerbically scorned our survival strategies. Put in a nutshell, he blamed all regional ills on Israel.

The inescapable corollary is that justice can only be achieved by righting wayward Israel’s wrongs and winning concessions from it. Unambiguously placing the onus upon Israel, Panetta indeed urged Israel to take risks and “lean forward” to achieve peace with the Palestinians. Never mind that Israel had already taken risks aplenty – time after disastrous time – gaining nothing but more bloodshed and abuse for its sacrifices, while whetting appetites for yet more sacrifices.

What if our goodwill blows up in our faces yet again? “If the gestures are rebuked, the world will see those rebukes for what they are. And that is exactly why Israel should pursue them,” Panetta pontificated.

Subtext: Israel needs to bare its throat to genocidal enemies, so that the watching world would admire its virtue. One would think Panetta, a former CIA director, has just surfaced from a sealed bunker, entirely oblivious to repeated displays of Israeli virtue that only intensified Israel’s vilification.

We won’t be better liked for being weaker, and getting weaker won’t improve our self-preservation prospects.

Yet weakening Israel is precisely the Obama administration’s definition for “just,” and consequently the “pursuit” of a just solution means twisting Israel’s arms. This begins with reading it the riot act.

That was plainly Panetta’s mission when he sternly warned against a preemptive Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities.

That was plainly Panetta’s mission when pompously proposing that Israel “reach out and mend fences with those who share an interest in regional stability – countries like Turkey and Egypt.” We might question how much stability has been furthered by Egypt and Turkey, but Panetta left no doubt regarding who’s liable for the busted fences.

That was plainly Panetta’s mission when he suggested that Israel undermines the Palestinian Authority and is at fault for not restarting moribund negotiations with it. That was why he hectored: “Just get to the damn table.”

In the simplistic Obamaesque worldview, Israel is the irritant that predisposes the entire Arab/Muslim sphere against America.

Israel is the figurative poison in the Mideastern well, much like the contaminants with which Suha insisted Israel literally polluted actual Palestinian wells.

Unfortunately (by their perception) Obama and crew can’t thoroughly disinfect the region from the Israeli venom. Even a faint trace of such sentiment would be politically super-stupid with elections in the offing.

But Barack, Hillary and Leon can bully us while nonetheless posing as our bosom buddies. Of course, successive Israeli governments have well demonstrated that crude pressure from Oval Office patrons can be marketed as evidence of deep, abiding friendship.