Obama at AIPAC conference
Obama at AIPAC conferenceIsrael news photo: file

“Ethnic minorities like the Jews are an integral part of the American nation, and every president in the White House understands that if he ignores the Jews of the United States and their supporters he will be making a mistake,” Professor Shlomo Aronson, an expert on political science from the Hebrew University, told Arutz Sheva Thursday. “Even Barack Obama would not think of entering a confrontation with the Jews of the United States,” he said.

Asked if President Obama's relative silence in the face of the Iranian nuclear danger could be compared to the silence of Presidents Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman in the face of the Holocaust, Prof. Aronson, a former holder of 1939 Club Holocaust Chair at UCLA, said there was no comparison between the two situations.

"The U.S. In that period was dragged into participating in World War Two after Japan and Nazi Germany attacked it,” he said. “Previously there was a debate in the U.S., whether or not to join the war. The Americans thou

Nazi Germany was a power. Iran is a third world country.

ght that after World War One, there was no point in entering another war.”

Many things have changed

"It was a different world then and the attitude to the Jewish question was different from today,” he explained. “At that time, the entire matter of the Jews seemed to the Americans like something that was not their business. The Jews were a scattered and dislocated people without a country or an army, the British ruled the Land of Israel and as far as the Americans were concerned, the Jews were not their problem.”

"But since then many things have changed. Today there is a Jewish state with an army, and the attitude towards Israel is built upon internal American considerations. Those were dark times of anti-Semitism in the US which washed its hands of dealing with the Holocaust, but today the situation is different.”

Prof. Aronson said that there was no room for comparison between Nazi Germany, which threatened the world, and Iran under Ahmadinejad. “Nazi Germany was a power. Iran is a Third World country,” he added. Obama simply prefers to fight Iran using a different tactic, Prof. Aronson estimated. “Iran is a very important subject that Obama wants to take care of, but the way that seems more realistic to him is to strangle Iran economically. He believes that this is a very sensitive subject for the Iranians and that this is what will truly make them feel the pressure.”