Tragic, yet typical
By Ari Kaufman (07/22/06)
As Hezbollah, Hamas, Al Qaeda and Islamic Insurgents target the peaceful way we all live on a daily basis, one would surmise that the American Jew, the most despised group of the terrorists, would be the most fervently supportive of the Bush Administration and the War on Terror.
Think again.
As an American Jew, one who naively voted Democratic up until 9/11, but now an unabashed Bush and War on Terror supporter, I have seen the proverbial light. Sadly, precious few others of my ilk have. I can count on one hand the number of Republican Jews I have in my family or close friend base and can count on two hands the number of Bush supporting Jews I know. Yet, to my utter disbelief yet slow acceptance, I would need multiple minutes and a lot of Pepto Bismol to add up the amount of Bush-hating, anti-War Jewish friends and family I know.
Two thoughtful articles in the past year tackle this matter coherently and logically. I sent the first, "Dumb Jews," out to my Republican-fearing, coastal-residing Jewish friends back in November. None commented back, many blocked my email address. Freedom of speech ends at their inboxes, it seemed. This most recent one, entitled, "When Will They Ever Learn" would likely suffer the same fate, so I won’t bother. To them, a Bush supporter is sacrilegious, not that any of them understand religion nor respect it. That the article makes the important note that Tom Delay, hated amongst Jews, a man who my friend's mother called "a thoroughly evil man, second only to Bin Laden," is accrately noted to have been "one of the best friends Israel ever had in American politics, and one of the most effective symbols of Republican support for Israel" is immaterial, it sadly seems. Much as author, David Gelernter mentions, American Jews move left as the left moves away from Israel. That is very telling, or at least it should be.
These lawyers, doctors and successful tycoons have absolutely zero interest in being open-minded and reading something not written in the only bibles these secular peons read, the NY Times or the Washington Post. If one of their counterculture, Ivy league former classmates did not write it, why would it have any relevance? Their legal relativist views go only so far as the left side of the spectrum.
They have no qualms with calling me or any Bush supporter a warmongering fascist and any patriot who waves a flag a blind jingoist, but by golly, if you asked them to watch Fox News, attend temple or tolerate Conservative speech in schools, they’d call you Hitler, and tell you to turn on the television and see the "real" atrocities occurring at Gitmo and formerly Abu Ghraib. Their ACLU minds see those places as the major issue while the NSA and Christianity as bigger dangers than Radical Islam. After all, Bob Herbert - who writes bi-weekly op-eds accusing the US (never our enemies) of human rights violations - have told them so many times, so why would they seek out further information and be original when an expert has told them so? Dennis Prager brilliantly explained how this works with Global Warming.
The media often tells us that anti-Semitism is on the rise. What they don’t tell us is that it is not necessarily on the rise in Alabama or Idaho (although modern leftist Jewry’s despicable actions make me occasionally anti-Jew); it’s on the rise in the Black Community, in Europe and, undoubtedly, on American college campuses. Somehow this news, for obvious reasons, slipped past CNN and NPR, even though hundreds of books have been written on these topics, not to mention numerous websites and articles. The liberal, PC Jew, would rather eat pork than chastise their beloved Blacks and Europeans.
When I present information of anti-Zionism’s rise on campus to parents of prospective Jewish college students, they laugh, and excuse themselves to write their six figure checks to Michigan and Berkeley, totally unconcerned with the atmosphere therein, or in say, Boulder and Cambridge, or the fact that this money may be funneled to Pro-Islam organizations. So long as Sarah will join the Jewish sorority her mom belonged to in the 70s and maybe meet a "nice Jewish guy" or that Justin will have a better chance of attaining admission to GW Law via Emory undergrad, these ancillary factors are as unimportant as the Israeli divestment campaign or the poor farmers in Kansas.
Anti-Semitism may not be a visible thing to many Jews, but the blatant disrespect of our Judeo-Christian values, our religion’s glorious past and an unsubstantiated and outdated hatred of Christians is difficult to swallow. A bequeathing of all traditions and history simply to live life to the fullest in New York or Los Angeles makes me apoplectic, no matter which way one votes. And no, a six-figure Bat Mitzvah for Rachel does not make you a "good Jew." Your mother would not be proud. Our ancestors worked years in the ghettos simply to muster enough money and courage to bring you to this country you now degrade and embarrass with your expenditures. The American Jew is hopefully far more familiar with abject poverty in his/her former homelands than the "African American" whose lineage last stepped foot in Africa more than 250 years ago.
Even with a large push of sagacious first time Republican voters like yours truly, President Bush received roughly 25% of the Jewish vote, this still means that three in four Jews still has little concern over the future of America, Israel and the world as a whole. When I was 22 and just out of college in California, my elitism led me to make a horrific mistake an vote for Al Gore over George Bush simply because "Bush didn’t speak as well." I matured past that by September 12, 2001. Most so-called "brilliant" Jews have not, and that’s very embarrassing and telling.
I suppose living your daily life as a lawyer in the Maryland suburbs, where your entire day places you in zero encounters with anyone who does not believe Bill Maher and Jon Stewart would make fabulous presidents, can leave you blinded to the realities of the political world. However, you’d think that such a successful, seemingly knowledgeable and intelligent ethnic group such as the Jews would feel shame in spouting such specious political rhetoric.
While most liberal Jews can tell you all the wonderful things about FDR, JFK and Bill Clinton, the most insightful lines of slander they can direct toward Bush is
"he lied, thousands died; we are the terrorists; war is not working; this country is run by the Christian Right and Jesus; he’s not MY president; you’re just not smart enough to understand how he has ruined the country and walked all over the constitution; we miss Clinton; stop looking at everything in good versus evil and black and white; let’s leave Iraq before we make it worse than we already have; this war was a grotesque mistake."
At some point, one stops laughing at Michael Savage’s claim that liberalism is a mental disorder and realizes he just may be accurate.
Their beloved politicians echo these same words each day, especially the party leaders. Should the Jews, with their money and influence push the left into power in 2006 and 2008, surely they’ll see what Democratic"leaders" like Jon Conyers, Charley Rangel, Cynthia McKinney, Dick Durbin, Harry Reid, Hillary Clinton, Howard Dean, Nancy Pelosi, and of course, new hero, Barak Obama, feel about Jews. We’ll be speaking Arabic within a decade, and as I have been telling these feckless fools for nearly five years, you’ll, like Ben Stein, be begging for the Bush era.
Sadly, it would then be too late, and the self-loathing Jews will truly have succeeded in their own self-destruction. That would be utterly tragic, but typical.
Ari Kaufman
http://indeed.blog-city.com
"One day, our grandchildren may ask us what we did when Islamic fascism threatened the free world. Some of us will say we were preoccupied with fighting that threat wherever possible; others will be able to say they fought carbon dioxide emissions. One of us will look bad." (Dennis Prager)
"A man who is not liberal at 20 has no heart; a man who is not conservative at 30 has no brain." (Winston Churchill)
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