Is it because she is fleeing prosecution for knowingly submitting a forged document to a federal court? Is it because she is secretly an Israeli agent working to undermine Barack Obama? Is it because she fears that black men in suits and sunglasses are coming from Washington to kill her?

I don't know the answer, but "birther queen" Orly Taitz was indeed interviewed by MSNBC from Tel Aviv on Aug. 3 - only two days after submitting, to a federal district court in California for "authentication," a document alleged to be Obama's Kenyan birth certificate now pretty conclusively proven to be a forgery. Following her gleeful release of the document on Aug. 1, Taitz must be a little surprised by the speed at which it has been picked apart on the internet and shown to be an almost certain forgery. I don't know what the penalty might be if it is determined that Taitz knowingly submitted a forged document to a federal court for the sole purpose of doing political harm to the President of the United States, but it is the one good reason I can think of why she would so suddenly leave the country at what only two days ago seemed (at least to her and her demented followers) to be her moment of triumph. While she may indeed fear that black Men in Black are coming to kill her, I would seriously question the theory some have suggested that she might be an Israeli agent working to undermine Obama, if only because I assume the Israelis would be smarter than to entrust such a task to such an obvious nutjob as Orly Taitz.

Taitz appears haggard and even more disturbed than usual in her MSNBC interview with David Schuster, who charged in a question at the end of the interview that Taitz refused a ride to MSNBC's affiliate in Tel Aviv the same day because the driver appeared to be a Muslim. A Soviet-born holder of dual US/Israeli citizenship, Taitz is on record with the Orange County Register stating that Israel should not merely defeat but "exterminate" its Arab enemies, whatever "collateral damage" may occur among innocent Arab civilians (see also Tablet). Having wondered previously why an immigrant from the former Soviet Union would be as obsessed with Obama's birth certificate as any down-home American redneck, I'm beginning to to think it might just be a case of Transatlantic Islamophobia.

Orly Taitz claims that she is merely a "lawyer," with a purely "legal" interest in the details of Obama's birth, but I obviously suspect there's more to her Obama birth obsession than this or mere insanity. Taitz hails from a milieu of Soviet-born Israelis among whom far-right, anti-Arab and anti-Muslim sentiment runs much stronger by most accounts than among the general Israeli population, as numerous Israeli and international sources have observed. Witness the rise of Avigdor Lieberman, Soviet-born leader of the far-right Yisrael Beiteinu party, made up mostly of other Soviet-born Israelis with strongly anti-Arab views, many of whom live not in Israel itself but in West Bank settlements; and many of whom really, really don't like Barack Hussein Obama.

Taitz has a documented association with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), a powerful pro-Israel lobby group with close ties to Binyamin Netanyahu's right-wing Likud party, as Allison Hoffman notes in Tablet. I'd be very interested in hearing what sympathies Taitz may have not just for Likud but for Yisrael Beiteinu, and what connections she may have with Soviet-born settlers in the West Bank. As observed above, she is on record saying that Israel's Arab enemies should be "exterminated" rather than merely defeated, and appears to have refused a ride to MSNBC's affiliate in Tel Aviv because she believed the driver to be a Muslim. Like right-wing settlers (see video), Taitz is also fond of calling her critics "nazis" or "brownshirts," as she did with David Schuster in her interview from Tel Aviv. Taitz spoke about her birther activities in a March 1 interview with Israeli National Radio.

Could this be why she has found so much in common with Islamophobic American rednecks who think that Obama is a secret Muslim born in Kenya? Could it also be that America's best interests are not those she has most at heart in her dogged efforts to undermine our president?

Mark C. Eades
http://www.mceades.com