The Times They are a Changin .......

It was no coincidence that Karl Marx was Jewish as were several of his collaborators.

And the tradition of liberalism continues to this very day as we can see by the fact that a full 78% of those practicing Judaism as well as those who consider themselves to be culturally Jewish if not religiously observant voted for Obama in 2008.

But not any longer, and no small wonder as we witness the policies of this White House with respect to Israel.

The National Security Adviser, General James Jones is not known as a friend of the Jewish State. It was Jones who put together the team of Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski to meet with the President and advise him to impose a solution on Israel.

Earlier this week we may have gotten some insight into why Jones is not a fan of the Jewish Homeland. He was giving the keynote speech at a Washington Institute For Near East Policy and started it out with a “Joke” that borders on anti-Semitic, teaching the crowd that Jews are just greedy merchants in the same vein as Shakespeare’s Shylock.

It went like this:

“A Taliban militant gets lost and is wandering around the desert looking for water. He finally arrives at a store run by a Jew and asks for water. The Jewish vendor tells him he doesn’t have any water but can gladly sell him a tie. The Taliban, the jokes goes on, begins to curse and yell at the Jewish storeowner. The Jew, unmoved, offers the rude militant an idea: Beyond the hill, there is a restaurant; they can sell you water. The Taliban keeps cursing and finally leaves toward the hill. An hour later he’s back at the tie store. He walks in and tells the merchant: “Your brother tells me I need a tie to get into the restaurant”.

It is incidents like this as well Obama’s treatment of Prime Minister Netanyahu and his unabashed toadying to the Arab world that have brought about a stunning turnaround where Obama has lost roughly half of his support among Jewish voters.

A poll by McLaughlin and Associates found that, while 78 percent of Jewish voters cast their ballots for Obama, only 42 percent of Jewish voters would vote to re-elect him. A plurality — 46 percent — would consider voting for anyone else. That compares with 21 percent who voted for John McCain.

Ever since he learned of Obama’s ties to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Morton Klein, president of the Zionist Organization of America, has been warning fellow Jews that Obama would be antithetical to Jewish interests, not only as they relate to Israel but also to issues that affect all Americans.

Before Obama was elected, Klein, whose organization of 30,000 members is the oldest pro-Israel group in the country, felt like a pariah. Now, as he speaks to Jewish audiences on a weekly basis, he has found that the climate has changed dramatically.“As I speak at synagogues now around the country, I haven’t had a single person during Q and A or after my talk ask how I could be so critical of Obama,” Klein said.

Klein tells his audiences they should not be surprised that Obama’s left-leaning policies appear to tilt more toward the Palestinians than to Israelis. He cites the fact that Obama and his wife, Michelle, spent 20 years listening to Wright, who routinely denounced Israel as a racist state and America for allegedly having created the AIDS virus to kill off blacks. Wright, whom Obama described as a mentor and sounding board, even gave an award for lifetime achievement to Louis Farrakhan.“God damn America,” Wright shouted in one of his sermons.

Obama’s speeches have been “inimical to Israel and supportive of the stream of false Palestinian Arab claims concerning Israel,” Klein says. “He is relentlessly pressuring Israel while applying virtually almost no pressure on the Palestinian Authority to fulfill its written obligations. He is worse than Jimmy Carter was when he was president. It was so obvious if you just looked at Obama’s associations before he was elected. Jews simply ignored that.”

David Remnick’s book “The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama” quotes an unidentified campaign aide to Hillary Clinton as saying that, if the stories about Wright’s ties to Obama had appeared in January 2008, “it would have been over,” meaning Hillary would have won the Democratic nomination for president.In fact, those stories on Wright were appearing as early as January 2008 but the mainstream media ignored them and would not pick them up until mid-March.

Before the election, Klein remembers, “If I talked about Reverend Wright in talks at synagogues, they would say I was using guilt by association. I would always explain you can’t say that. He chose this church. He chose to have a friendship with Wright because this is a person he is comfortable with and because Wright espouses views he believes in.”Klein notes, “If a Jew was a member of a synagogue where the rabbi preached hatred of blacks, it would be clear that that Jew would be comfortable with anti-black racism. I couldn’t remain for a week at a synagogue where a rabbi made a hateful speech toward blacks. I’d quit immediately.”But now the tide is turning, Klein says.

As recently as last weekend, “At the synagogue where I spoke, two of my most left-wing lunatic friends were saying, ‘My God, Mort, you were right. I never should have voted for Obama.’”Several Jewish leaders have turned against Obama as well, Klein says, some openly and some behind the scenes because they do not want to cut off ties with a president. Klein quotes one of the most prominent Jewish leaders as having told him recently, “It’s better if I’m on the inside than the outside. So there’s no point in my publicly criticizing him because then I won’t have influence.”

“What influence?” Klein asks rhetorically. “It felt so good to so many liberals to be voting for the first black man to run for president that nothing else mattered,” Klein says. “They felt good proving that they are not racist.”Only 17 percent of Orthodox Jews now would vote to re-elect Obama, according to the McLaughlin poll. Among conservative Jews, 38 percent would vote for him again. Fifty-two percent of reform Jews would re-elect him. Among Jews who have been to Israel, 36 percent now would cast their ballots for him. When polled, 12 percent responded they did not know or refused to answer.

“The majority of Jews now realize that this guy is bad for Israel, let alone bad for America,” Klein says.

And there you have it.