In this interview, Barack Obama clearly demonstrates he has failed to consider that the siege of Israel has no end, but is manageable, that Muslims will never willingly accept Israel, whatever its size, but can be forced to accept it, unwillingly, whatever its size, if Israel remains stronger, overwhelmingly so, and clearly perceived as such. He has not, Barack Obama, as yet decided to study the geopolitics, the worldview, of Islam. In this respect he is not different, not even worse, from many others, but at this point, one needs someone who will take the time to sit to school (and not with the espositos and armstrongs), will learn the texts, tenets, attitudes of Islam. Barack Obama's own experience gives him the feeling that somehow he knows, somehow he can deal with Muslims. But he can't, as long as he refuses to, or simply cannot bring himself to, learn about Islam. Having a Muslim father, or step-father, or living in Indonesia, is not merely insufficient, but is perhaps worse than no connection at all, because it fools him, apparently, into thinking he does know something.

And his view of Israel is clearly that of someone who has accepted -- without critical investigation -- the notion of a "Palestinian people" even though that "people" were never mentioned prior to the Six-Day War, and even though we have abundant testimony as to the propagandistic origins of that recent invention (see, for example, Zuhair Mohsen's testimony). He talks of the "settlements" like any Guardian editorialist, as someone who believes or pretends to believe that if Israel gives up its legal, moral, and historic claim then there will be peace. But there was no peace when there was not, between 1948 and June 1967, not a single Israeli either in Gaza or the "West Bank." There was not much peace, either, for the Jews, who bought land -- not a single dunam was expropriated until after the 1948 war, and precious little at that, for 90% of the land was not privately owned, but "state or waste land" that devolved, from the Ottomans, to the Mandatory Authority, to the successor state of the Mandate, Israel -- during the pre-state period. War was made on them by the Arabs, whenever they thought they could engage in it with impunity.

The legal claim for the Jews, the one enshrined in the Preamble to the Mandate for Palestine, which sets out the goal -- a Jewish National Home -- to be achieved through the Mandatory power's facilitating "Jewish immigration" and encouraging "close Jewish settlement on the land" -- which when all of Eastern Palestine (i.e., Jordan) was closed to the terms of the Mandate then constituted an area that turned out to be less than one-one-thousandth of the land area ruled by the Arabs, is land that Israel is entitled to hold onto, not only because of the express terms of the Mandate, but by all the rules of warfare (see, inter alia, the disposition of the Sudtirol -- now Alto Adige -- after World War I). In the Middle East and North Africa, in those lands inaccurately called collectively "the Arab world,"  Kurds, Berbers, Copts, Assyrians, and every other non-Muslim or non-Arab minority do not receive equal treatment with Muslim Arabs, nor can they aspire even to autonomy, much less independence. The "clean hands" doctrine that Barack Obama may remember from first-year Torts applies as well to situations bigger than private wrongs.

He needs to learn that David Grossman, whom he says in the interview he has read and admires, is a disturbing  example of Israel leftism at its purest, an example of someone who preaches a moral purity that is impossible, that would spell Israel's end, and that is singularly unrealistic in its gauging of the motives of those who wish to see Israel destroyed, some quickly, with the Fast Jihad of Hamas, and some, more cleverly and patiently, in a necessarily less abrupt but no less relentless way, the Slow Jihadists of Fatah.

David Grossman knows nothing about Islam, though his life and that of his country depend on his knowing about Islam. And it is unfair of Barack Obama not to begin to study this Total Belief-System, and see what it means not only for the Jews of Israel, but for Christians in Nigeria and the Sudan and elsewhere in sub-Saharan Africa, and for Buddhists in southern Thailand and elsewhere in Asia, and for Hindus, those who still have managed to hold on in Pakistan and Bangladesh, and those subject to Muslim attacks in Kashmir and India itself. He needs to find out, to figure out, why when every other group of immigrants somehow manages slowly or rapidly to integrate into very various societies -- the Chinese, the Vietnamese, the non-Muslim blacks from Africa or the Caribbean, the Hindus -- why there is a problem, and a problem everywhere, with Muslims alone. It is not surprising. They come, packed in their mental luggage, and undeclared, a Belief System that is not merely an alien but an alien and a hostile creed, one which inculcates the idea that the essential division of humanity is between Believer and Infidel, and that a state of permanent war must exist between the two, until all obstacles to the spread, and then the dominance, of Islam, are removed, and Dar al-Harb is swallowed up by Dar al-Islam. If he cannot learn that, if he will not learn that, then such mistakes, based on sentimentalism, as the transplanting-democracy project, the Light-Unto-the-Muslim-Nations project, of Iraq, with all of its squandering, will no doubt continue. And it is impossible to think that Barack Obama will be comprehending, and therefore sufficiently alarmed, about the deployment of the Money Weapon, Da'wa, and demographic conquest by Muslims in Western Europe.

In fact, he may not even care. And that is something we need to find out about now, before the election.

Saying you are "unshakably committed to Israel's security" is the sort of thing everyone -- Jimmy Carter included -- says. It means nothing. One wishes to know: does he, or does he not, at this point understand that the war against Israel is an unassuageble -- but containable -- Jihad, and that the way to contain it is not by forcing Israel to make further suicidal surrenders, but to insist that it give up nothing further, and that its military be kept so strong as to keep the peace. For that military superiority of Israel, properly perceived, is the only thing that keeps the peace, and not all that peace-processing, or those treaties that are broken, by Muslims, simply mimicking the behavior, as is right and proper by their lights to do, of Muhammad with the Meccans, after he had signed with them the Treaty of Hudaibiyya in 628 A.D.

All this is now required not only of Barack Obama, but of any other candidate. The days when assertions of "support for Israel" could be accompanied by a continuing ignorance of the texts, tenets, attitudes of Islam, simply will not do.

Not that it ever did.