“IT WAS ALL DARK AND EMPTY IN THERE. AND THERE WERE LITTLE MICE IN THE CORNERS AND SPIDERS HAD SPUN THIS WEB…” That’s what Chevy Chase as Mr. Spock reported back after he attempted a Vulcan mindmeld with an NBC executive in Michael O’Donoghue’s classic “Last Voyage of the Starship Enterprise” parody from the first season of Saturday Night Live. Similarly, Michael Oren goes “Inside Obama’s Head,” which does not make the left happy, Jonathan S. Tobin writes at Commentary:

What did Oren say? He had the chutzpah to speculate as to what had driven the clear animus against Israel that Oren observed in an up close and personal fashion during his four years as his government’s envoy in Washington. As he did in his book, Oren said he devoted a great deal of thought to trying to figure out what was at the roots of the president’s insatiable and generally unrequited (with the exception of Iran’s regime in the nuclear talks) desire for outreach to the Muslim world that was exemplified in his 2009 Cairo address and his clear belief that America should distance itself from Israel. His primary answer was that Obama was the product of the elite academic institutions where he studied, such as Columbia University where radical Palestinian intellectual Edward Said shaped attitudes toward Islam and Israel. He also noted that the president’s personal experiences had made him more predisposed to view Islam as fundamentally unthreatening and to be uncomfortable with confronting the religious roots of Islamist terrorism even to the point of refusing to label the attacks in Paris this past January as being anti-Semitic.

In addition to its academic and international affairs origins, Obama’s attitudes toward Islam clearly stem from his personal interactions with Muslims. These were described in depth in his candid memoir, Dreams from My Father, published 13 years before his election as president. Obama wrote passionately of the Kenyan villages where, after many years of dislocation, he felt most at home and of his childhood experiences in Indonesia. I could imagine how a child raised by a Christian mother might see himself as a natural bridge between her two Muslim husbands. I could also speculate how that child’s abandonment by those men could lead him, many years later, to seek acceptance by their co-religionists.

Merely referencing Obama’s family and his connections to Muslims (or even his middle name Hussein) is considered evidence of prejudice by many of the president’s supporters. But it was particularly egregious of Foxman to claim these words showed Oren was engaging in “conspiracy theories.” But Oren wasn’t claiming the president was a Muslim rather than a Christian or an agent of Islam, as some rabid Obama-haters claim. As a historian, he was merely exploring the president’s own autobiography to see what in his background helped formed a mindset that led him to see an Islamist regime like Iran as a worthy focus of American engagement.

As Tobin writes, “for the sin of pointing out the president’s clear decision to distance the U.S. from Israel and to unsuccessfully embrace the Muslim world and trying to find a reason for this decision, Oren’s must be not merely be criticized by the left, the historian-turned-diplomat-turned-Knesset member must be destroyed.”