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“Facts,” the English philosopher and writer Aldous Huxley once observed, “don’t cease to exist because they are ignored.” Yet, in his recently released memoir,
A Promised Land, Barack Obama both ignores and omits key facts about the Middle East. In particular, the former president gets relevant Israeli history wrong.
Perhaps most disturbing, however, is Obama’s tendency to minimize Palestinian terrorism. For example, he refers to Hamas as merely a “Palestinian resistance group.” Yet, Obama doesn’t tell readers what exactly Hamas is “resisting.”
Hamas is a U.S.-designated terrorist organization that has called for the end of Israel and the genocide of Jews. The group has murdered and maimed hundreds of people—including Israelis, Americans and dissenting Palestinians. Hamas’s own foundational charter—often referred to as its Covenant—is virulently antisemitic, exhorting to “fight the Jews and kill them.” The Covenant declares that Jews control “world media, news agencies, the press” and that they are behind the “French Revolution, the Communist revolution and most of the revolutions.” As historian Jeffrey Herf noted in