Obama’s pilfered prayer

last updated 8 January 2015

A written prayer that Democrat Barack Obama placed in Jerusalem’s Western Wall was stolen, said Ed Morrissey in the blog Hot Air, and published on the front page of Israel’s Maariv newspaper. This exploitation of “a private communication between Obama and God” is “the cult of celebrity at its ugliest”—like “bugging a confessional to hear a Catholic candidate’s private conversation between his priest and the Lord.”

That it was stolen by a Jewish seminary student is “deeply troubling,” said Frank James in the Chicago Tribune’s The Swamp blog. Even if Maariv didn’t realize it’s wrong to publish a prayer pilfered from “the holiest of sites in Jerusalem,” you’d hope a seminary student would. “Here’s hoping this person eventually goes into some other line of work.”