Posted on 07/04/2009 5:23:43 PM PDT by Ooh-Ah
The American lawyer Alan Dershowitz is one of the most prolific, high-profile and indefatiguable defenders of Israel and the Jewish people against the tidal wave of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish feeling currently coursing through the west. So a piece by him in the Wall Street Journal giving expression to the rising anxiety being felt about Obama by American Jews naturally arouses great interest.
But just like the majority of American Jews, getting on for 80 per cent of whom voted for Obama, he is a Democrat supporter who is incapable of acknowledging the truth about this President. For most American Jews, the horror of even entertaining the hypothetical possibility that they might ever in a million years have to vote for a Republican is so great they simply cannot see what is staring them in the face -- that this Democratic President is lethal for both Israel and the free world. And in this article Dershowitz shows that he too is just as blind.
Acknowledging the anxiety among some American Jews about Obama’s attitude to Israel, Dershowitz concludes uneasily that there isn’t really a problem here because all Obama is doing is putting pressure on Israel over the settlements, which most American Jews don’t support anyway. But this is totally to miss the point. The pressure over the settlements per se is not the reason for the intense concern.
It is instead, first and foremost, the fact that Obama is treating Israel as if it is the obstacle to peace in the Middle East. Obama thus inverts aggressor and victim, denying Israel’s six-decade long victimisation and airbrushing out Arab aggression. The question remains: why has Obama chosen to pick a fight with Israel while soft-soaping Iran which is threatening it with genocide? The answer is obvious: Israel is to be used to buy off Iran just as Czechoslovakia was used at Munich. Indeed, I would say this is worse even than that, since I suspect that Obama – coming as he does from a radical leftist milieu, with vicious Israel-haters amongst his closest friends -- would be doing this to Israel even if Iran was not the problem that it is.
In any event, the double standard is egregious. Obama has torn up his previous understandings with Israel over the settlements while putting no pressure at all on the Palestinians, even though since they are the regional aggressor there can be no peace unless they end their aggression and certainly not until they accept Israel as a Jewish state, which they have said explicitly they will never do. On this, Obama is totally silent. So too is Dershowitz. That’s some omission.
Next, Obama is pressuring Israel to set up a Palestine state – within two years this will exist, swaggers Rahm Emanuel. But everyone knows that as soon as Israel leaves the West Bank, Hamas – or even worse – will take over. The only reason the (also appalling) Abbas is still in Ramallah, enabling Obama to pretend there is a Palestinian interlocutor for peace, is because the Israelis are keeping Hamas at bay. Yet Dershowitz writes:
There is no evidence of any weakening of American support for Israel's right to defend its children from the kind of rocket attacks candidate Obama commented on during his visit to Sderot.
So what exactly does he think would happen if Israel came out of the West Bank and the Hamas rockets were down the road from Jerusalem and Tel Aviv (literally: many in the west have absolutely no idea how tiny Israel is). It’s not a question of Israel’s ‘right to defend its children’. If Obama has his way, Israel would not be able to defend its children or anyone else, because Obama would have removed its defences by putting its enemies in charge of them. It is astounding that Dershowitz can’t see this.
Then there was Obama’s appalling Cairo speech -- which I wrote about here – in which he conspicuously refrained from committing himself to defending Zionism and the Jewish people from the attacks and incitement to genocide against them, but committed himself instead to defending their attackers against ‘negative stereotyping’. On this, Dershowitz has nothing to say.
Worse still, by falsely asserting that the Jewish aspiration for Israel derived from the Holocaust, Obama effectively denied that the Jewish people were in Israel as of right and thus endorsed the core element of the Arab and Muslim propaganda of war and extermination. On this, Dershowitz has nothing to say.
Obama drew a vile – and telling – equivalence between the Nazi extermination camps and the Palestinian ‘refugee’ camps. On this, Dershowitz has nothing to say. Obama's statement that the Palestinians ‘have suffered in pursuit of a homeland’ was grossly and historically untrue, and again denied Arab aggression. On this, Dershowitz has nothing to say. Equally vilely, Obama equated genocidal terrorism by the Palestinians with the civil rights movement in America and the resistance against apartheid in South Africa. On all of this, Dershowitz has nothing to say.
Dershowitz also grossly underplays the terrible harm Obama is doing to the security not just of Israel but the world through his reckless appeasement of Iran. In the last few weeks, this has actively undercut the Iranian democrats trying to oust their tyrannical regime, and has actually strengthened that regime. All the evidence suggests ever more strongly that Obama has decided America will ‘live with’ a nuclear Iran, whatever it does to its own people. Which leaves Israel hung out to dry.
But even here, where he is clearly most concerned, Dershowitz scuttles under his comfort blanket – Dennis Ross, who was originally supposed to have been the US special envoy to Iran but was recently announced senior director of the National Security Council and special assistant to the President for the region. It is not at all clear whether this ambiguous development represents a promotion or demotion for Ross. Either way, for Dershowitz to rest his optimism that Obama’s Iran policy will be all right on the night entirely upon the figure of Dennis Ross is pathetic. Ross, a Jew who played Mr Nice to Robert Malley’s Mr Nasty towards Israel in the Camp David debacle under President Clinton, is clearly being used by Obama as a human shield behind which he can bully Israel with impunity. American Jews assume that his proximity to Obama means the President’s intentions towards Israel are benign. Dazzled by this vision of Ross as the guarantor of Obama’s good faith, they thus ignore altogether the terrible import of the actual words coming out of the President’s mouth.
The fact is that many American Jews are so ignorant of the history of the Jewish people, the centrality of Israel in its history and the legality and justice of its position that they probably saw nothing wrong in Obama saying that the Jewish aspiration for Israel came out of the Holocaust because they think this too. Nor do they see the appalling double standard in the bullying of Israel over the settlements and what that tells us about Obama’s attitude towards Israel, because – as Dershowitz himself makes all too plain -- they too think in much the same way, that the settlements are the principal obstacle to peace.
Many if not most American Jews have a highly sentimentalised view of Israel. They never go there, are deeply ignorant of its history and current realities, and are infinitely more concerned with their own view of themselves as social liberals, a view reflected back at themselves through voting for a Democrat President.
Whatever else he is, however, Dershowitz is certainly not ignorant. Which makes this lamentable article all the more revealing, and depressing.
Few liberals do.
And by the time they do, it is too late.
BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA IN HIS OWN WORDS
NOW WE KNOW WHAT A COMMUNITY ORGANIZER DOES
OBAMA, THE STOCK MARKET, AND ENERGY
THE AUDACITY OF TRUTH ABOUT BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA'S UPBRINGING
He should face reality Obama would roast them at a 7/4 BBQ.
The problem for Dershowitz and other baby-killers is that they view pro-life politicians as so EVIL—Imagine, how evil can a politician GET, trying to limit a woman’s right to dismember her baby!!!—that they just cannot bring themselves to withdraw their support from baby-killing politicians. Now they have helped a Jew-hating baby-killer become the putative President, and they are torn between GOOD (baby-killing) and EVIL (Jew-hating).
...why has Obama chosen to pick a fight with Israel while soft-soaping Iran which is threatening it with genocide? The answer is obvious:Israel is to be used to buy off Iran just as Czechoslovakia was used at Munich. Indeed, I would say this is worse even than that, since I suspect that Obama – coming as he does from a radical leftist milieu, with vicious Israel-haters amongst his closest friends -- would be doing this to Israel even if Iran was not the problem that it is.
Dershowitz gets it, he has to. He just doesn’t want to admit that he was so wrong, and he is probably still hoping for a position on the Obama team. Dershowitz just doesn’t get it that he’ll be nothing but a benchwarmer on that team though, a bench warmer meant as token proof of Obama’s support for Israel.
Obama plans to use Israel as a bargaining chip with Iran. He’ll demand recognition of the Palestinian State and everything that goes with it, if Ahmadinejad swears on the Bible that he will stop the nuclear arms program.
Does the phrase "useful Idiot" ring a bell, Alan?
STE=Q
The problem is that we make the mistake of thinking that their decisions are rational. They aren't, they are emotionally based. It feels like Israel is the oppressor, therefore Israel is the oppressor. It is a simple as that.
We have to come up with an emotional appeal. Until we do, we will continue to lose ground.
Does everything have to be about abortion?
Get smart there are more ways than one to skin a cat to use an old trite phrase. You may not get everything you want but this country has to be moved spiritually not legally. Do we want to be as bad as the left when it comes to the Constitution.
?
ping
An important article.
It’s the most common thing in the world for a person to think that they are smart, can absorb ideas, and have and can develop insights in one area; and therefore are exactly that way in some new area quite unfamiliar with them.
It leads doctors and dentists to typically be the WORST investors in the stock maarket.
It leads Sam Zell, genius in the real estate world, to think he can run a newspaper, buy it, and promptly see it nosedive into the ground.
And it leads Dershowitz to think that he speaks for some segment of Jews, that he has some special insight, on a topic where he flat out knows very little.
In fact, he has no special insight whatsoever into the future of Israel. Quite the contrary. He simply recites tired, mush-brained America liberal dogma, and makes a compelling case to convince himself and others of that ilk what they already believe. It’s a tragedy that, as this article says, that he simply cannot consider voting for someone who staunchly supports Israel. No, he must stay true to East Coast his liberal intellectual roots. He must fall for the empty rhetoric. Not for a millisecond can voting for a Republican be considered. It’s too bad, but it’s an excellent illustration of how so many Jews could vote for a man even as he literally threatens to cut their throats. Ultimately, it’s suicide.
Ping!
Everything already is about abortion. It is the litmus test for everyone on the Left. It is the litmus test for the Supreme Court and for all national candidates.
And the Constitution ALREADY prohibits abortion, because it prohibits the States from denying equal protection of the law to any person.
Your comment about the Constitution is nonsensical.
It’s no wonder that liberals were giddy when Roe vs Wade was decided in favor of abortion on demand.
It turned the courts into a policy-making apparatus, populated by visceral activists, and legitimized psychotic rage in the streets.
IMHO
If you’d like to be on or off, please FR mail me.
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Dershofitz
would have to get his head . . . uhhhh . . . into some light . . . to realize much of anything.
Dershowitz is the archetypical Jewish 'Rat addict.
“Your comment about the Constitution is nonsensical.”
I live in an area of the country that is very Catholic and it is refreshing to find a Priest that believes in equal protection under the law.
I agree that everything is about abortion and that must be stoppped, the method is debatable and I doubt we would agree on the method. I am totally against abortion except for rape and incest and believe that in those cases you have to leave the final judgment to God. This one area is costing us votes from women that would prbably never have an abortion but don’t want to live in fear of it not being available. Flame away.
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