President of the United States of America Barack Obama had not been president for more than ten minutes when he slapped American Jews in the face (and by extension Israel and all Jews). Though he did it so subtly -- in plain sight and in front of the whole world -- no one noticed.

On January 21, 2009, about three-quarters of the way through his first inaugural address, after paragraphs of bromides about American greatness, he alluded to the menace of militant Islam:

For we know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness.  We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus, and non-believers.   We are shaped by every language and culture, drawn from every end of this Earth…

It has become customary in our time to speak of America as a Judeo-Christian civilization because the facts of history show that, so “a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus” as a new formulation of the melting pot meme was a major departure.

In fact, although the settling of the original Thirteen Colonies was almost exclusively the handiwork of Christians from northern Europe, by the time of the American Revolution there were already six Jewish communities, one in each of the major colonial cities. Jews fought and died in the Revolution, and in 1802, when the military academy at West Point opened its doors, one of the first two volunteer cadets was a Jew.

Jews have been part of American culture ever since in the Military, Medicine, Science, Technology, Literature, Theater, Music, Movies, Television, Academe, Law, Journalism and Business.

Jews invented the nuclear submarine providing the United States its greatest line of defense in the Cold War. A German Jew invented jeans, the quintessential American garment. Although always a tiny percentage of the population, they have always punched above their weight in contributions to America.

Christians and therefore Jews too built the country.  In American cities every December, merchants decorate their shop windows with “Merry Christmas” & “Happy Hanukah” signs. The country has most definitely been a Judeo-Christian enterprise.

Muslims, by contrast, played no role in the making of America.  There is no evidence of a Muslim presence before the 20th century. Yet here on that January day was the brand new American President orating that the U.S. was “a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus…”

In this formulation, the Jews have been bumped back to third place, elbowed, so to speak, aside by Muslims who take their place.  This recalls what happened in the 7^th century when their Prophet Muhammad told his followers that they had replaced the Jews as Allah’s Chosen People.

Barack Obama during his campaign had vowed to “fundamentally change this country,” and, in retrospect, this formulation was part of that effort.  The fundamental change would include the dispossession of the Jews of their second place in American culture and even downgrade them to the ranks of Hindus, whose tradition, like Islam, played no role in formrative United States history.

Indeed, Obama’s next sentence continued, “To the Muslim world, we seek a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect,” and this new formulation was surely part of that “new way forward” in the matter of Islam’s role in American life.

Another feature of Obama’s desired transformation was on display two and one-half months later -- on April Fool’s Day no less -- when he was videotaped obsequiously bowing down before the king of Saudi Arabia whose official title includes Guardian of the Two Mosques (alluding to the ones in Mecca and Medina).  This was a gesture one cannot imagine Obama ever executing before any other national leader -- let alone the prime minister of Israel.

And that bow was an offense against protocol and custom -- the Revolution had been not only a war of national liberation but a rejection of the very institution of monarchy.  American presidents do not bow down to kings  and thus it was doubly an insult, for this was no ordinary monarch but the potentate of the country where fifteen of the nineteen skyjackers on September 11, 2001 were raised and shaped by this king’s religion, including 9-11’s evil mastermind Osama bin Laden.

What Obama might have done was demand that the king show “mutual respect” by bowing down to him to beg forgiveness that some of his subjects had engineered that eruption of Muslim Hell on earth perpetrated against his fellow Americans.  In Israel in 1997, after a Jordanian soldier had murdered seven little Jewish girls, the king of Jordan crossed over the River to visit the grieving mothers and literally went down on his knees to express his sorrow and shame.  Obama should have asked the Guardian of the Two Mosques to do that too. Instead, there on view for posterity on YouTube is the President’s protruding posterior.

Two months later, in June 2009, Mr. Obama made his first trip to the Middle East but snubbed Israel, America’s long-time and most faithful ally.  He flew instead to Egypt where he delivered a speech at Al-Azhar, Sunni Islam’s oldest seminary, where Osama bin Ladin, Haj Amin al-Husseini, Sheik Ahmad Yassin and many other Muslim priests who preach the virtue of terror studied Islam and wallowed in its classical, Muslim-style Jew-hatred.

In his speech, Obama praised this religion beyond the boundaries of historical truth:

As a student of history, I also know civilization's debt to Islam.  It was Islam at places like Al-Azhar that carried the light of learning through so many centuries, paving the way for Europe's Renaissance and Enlightenment…And throughout history, Islam has demonstrated through words and deeds the possibilities of religious tolerance and racial equality.  I also know that Islam has always been a part of America's story.  The first nation to recognize my country was Morocco.  In signing the Treaty of Tripoli in 1796, our second President John Adams wrote, "The United States has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Muslims."  And since our founding, American Muslims have enriched the United States.  They have fought in our wars, they have served in government, they have stood for civil rights, they have started businesses, they have taught at our Universities, they’ve excelled in our sports arenas, they've won Nobel Prizes, built our tallest building, and lit the Olympic Torch.  And when the first Muslim-American was recently elected to Congress, he took the oath to defend our Constitution using the same Holy Koran that one of our Founding Fathers, Thomas Jefferson, kept in his personal library.

This was the vandalizing of history.  In no way is it true that “…since our [America’s] founding, Muslims have enriched the United States…”  As noted, their presence came quite late, and what enrichment could he have had in mind?

And as for the early treaty with Tripoli (Libya): John Adams’s statement was made after the repeated hijacking of American merchant ships and the cruel enslavement of their passengers and crews by the misnamed “Barbary Pirates.”  That was a colloquial nickname for them; in reality, they were not pirates but the official navies of recognized Muslim powers.  Adams’s statement had been an attempt to appease them in the hope they would honor the treaty they had just signed and thenceforth cease and desist from attacking American merchant ships (which they did not).

Likewise, Obama’s reference to Thomas Jefferson was false.  The principle author of the Declaration of Independence and first Secretary of State purchased his Koran when in Paris in order to study the intolerable aggression being perpetrated against fellow Americans by these so-called “pirates” who Jefferson learned were in reality observant Muslims who justified their hijacking and enslaving of infidels with the jihad.

Jefferson spent five years in France after the Revolution as a trade commissioner, then ambassador.  That is when he bought his Koran, because almost every day of these years there were American hostages enslaved in North Africa that he struggled to but failed to liberate.  In this period, he even met in London with an ambassador from the Bashaw (pasha) of Tripoli, a predecessor of Muammar Gaddafi who demanded $100,000 not to begin hijacking American ships and enslaving all the people aboard.  Jefferson listened as the ambassador cited the jihad as the justification for this behavior.  That was in 1786.

Fifteen years later, as America’s third president and still the country’s No. 1 hawk for war with Islam, Jefferson went to war against Tripoli because he had no doubt that these “pirates” were not independent freebooters but self-described holy warriors/mujahideen who could only be subdued via military force majeure.  They were beyond reason.

By contrast, America’s forty-fourth president, early in his first term, ordered his administration never to use the words “Islam,” “Muslim” and “terrorism” in the same sentence.

Then in November of his first year in office, on the Ft. Hood, Texas army base, a Muslim shouting “Allahu Akbar!” massacred thirteen fellow soldiers, which carnage Obama insisted had nothing to do with Islam.

And we have not even touched on his other, serial insults to Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and by extension the people of the democratic State of Israel that elected him.

Barack Obama’s affection for Islam and his Islamic habit of trashing historical truth have been right there from his first inaugural speech when he misdescribed American society by demoting the place of the Jews in it.

Finally, for any who doubt this critical portrait: remember, too, that the day after his first inaugural speech and that evening’s series of inaugural balls and festivities, when he entered the Oval Office the next morning to begin work as president -- with the U.S. economy in a crisis not seen since the Great Depression of the 1930s -- he asked that his first phone call as president be put through not to some expert on economics but Mahmoud Abbas, the Holocaust Denier and international Muslim terrorist criminal.

President Obama has been aggressing against the Jews in America and Israel since his first minutes on the job.  No wonder, then, in January 2015, he did not attend the mass demonstration in Paris after the massacres by Muslims of the Charlie Hebdo staff and four Jews buying food for the Holy Sabbath.

Sha’i ben-Tekoa’s PHANTOM NATION: Inventing the “Palestinians” as the Obstacle to Peace is available in Kindle or soft cover at Amazon.com.