Barack Obama’s trip to Northern Ireland was billed as a homecoming of sorts — an honorary doctorate from Queen’s University Belfast, a sit-down with journalist Susan McKay at the city’s O2 Arena, and another laurel for a former president who has collected them on both sides of the Atlantic. What it produced instead was a fresh round of transatlantic recrimination over Israel, according to an account in American Thinker.
During the Belfast conversation, Obama criticized Israel in terms that the outlet describes as one-sided. He said Jews who fled persecution in Europe “took land” that belonged to Palestinians, argued that Israel had “ceded moral ground” through its security policies, and questioned whether relying on military strength without offering concessions could trade short-term gains for longer-term damage to the prospects for peace.
The line that traveled furthest came as a direct challenge to the Jewish state: “Are you just going to be behind walls and wipe out everybody around you, or are you going to find some just way of defending yourself while still acting in an ethical, moral way?”
Netanyahu’s Answer
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu answered quickly, in a video posted to X. Jews, he said, are “in the land of our forefathers” and are not an obstacle to peace. “The Jewish people are not foreign occupiers in the land of our forefathers. Our history is not a colonial enterprise. Our land is not stolen land. This is our homeland. It’s called Judea. That’s where Jews come from,” Netanyahu said, adding that the real barrier to peace is “the refusal of our enemies and America’s enemies to recognize the Jewish people’s right to a state of our own in any boundary.”
American Thinker’s Jeannie DeAngelis frames Obama’s remarks as the latest installment in a long pattern rather than a departure. She points back to 2009, when as president he said the United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements, and argues that his sympathy for generations of persecuted Jews sits uneasily beside a reading of history in which territorial claims are judged differently depending on who did the conquering and when.
Her central complaint is about what went unmentioned. In her telling, Obama skipped the ancient Jewish kingdoms, the seventh-century Arab conquest, and the fact that Jewish leaders accepted the 1947 U.N. partition plan while Palestinian Arab leaders and Arab states rejected it. She also lists the 1948 war, Gaza’s years under Egyptian control, the 1967 war, and Israel’s 2005 withdrawal from Gaza as context she says the former president left out while implying that Israel is the primary aggressor.
A Question of Weighing Oct. 7
The piece turns sharply on the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack, in which roughly 1,200 people were killed and 251 taken hostage, with reports of rape and torture. DeAngelis acknowledges that Obama called the attack an atrocity, but argues that his follow-up remarks to McKay carried an undercurrent of implied justification. Acknowledging grievances, she writes, is not the same as treating them as an excuse for murderous attacks on civilians.
She also reads the Belfast appearance against Obama’s recent company. The former president has been seen with two politicians she describes as outspokenly hostile to Israel: Zohran Mamdani and Abdul El-Sayed, the Michigan Senate candidate Obama has said he would campaign for. That, she suggests, sharpens the question of whether silence about such views amounts to agreement with them.
On Mamdani, the piece notes that he skipped the Israel Day Parade in May 2026 but attended Gay Pride in June, and quotes his remark that “any state that privileges one religion over the other is one that I can’t tell you I support” — which DeAngelis reads as a selective application of a principle he does not apply to others. On El-Sayed, she cites an August 2026 appearance on Morning Joe in which he was asked whether his objection was to Netanyahu personally or to Israel as a nation. His answer: “We’ve been talking about an illegal apartheid regime for a very, very long time. And that supersedes Netanyahu himself.”
The column also takes a swipe at what it calls a gap in consistency, noting that Obama, who describes himself as a feminist, has not directly addressed Hamas’s practice of gender apartheid. It pairs Mamdani’s October 7 anniversary remarks — an initial acknowledgment of Hamas’s atrocities followed by accusations aimed at Israel — with what it calls Obama’s own “concession-and-pivot” style.
An Unanswered Question
DeAngelis’s broader worry is not really about one speech. It is about reach. What happens, she asks, when someone as influential as Obama presents a selective historical account that most listeners lack the expertise to challenge — and what happens when that account is picked up and used to justify violence against Jews?
She closes by looking ahead to October 24, when Obama is scheduled to campaign in Michigan for El-Sayed, a candidate she describes as not shy about criticizing U.S. military funding for Israel and who has declined to commit to either a one-state or two-state outcome. Her parting question is pointed: is this an Obama October surprise, or a defense of Hamas tour?
It is worth being clear about the genre here. This is a polemic, not a transcript, and its portrait of Obama’s Belfast remarks is filtered through an unmistakably hostile lens. Readers who want the full exchange will need McKay’s account and the former president’s own words. But the reaction it has drawn — from Netanyahu’s video to the argument over which history belongs in the room — is real, and it is unlikely to stay confined to Northern Ireland.
Source: www.americanthinker.com — https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2026/10/in-northern-ireland-obama-throws-bombs-at-israel/