Why Jews Welcome Muslims

Mass Moslem immigration into America combined with world-wide Moslem Jew-hatred poses an unprecedented threat to American Jews-a "perfect storm" that is forcing at least some Jews into an agonizing re-appraisal of their traditional support for open immigration. So says Stephen Steinlight in his hard-hitting essay, "High Noon to Midnight: Why Current Immigration Policy Dooms American Jewry," published by the Center for Immigration Studies. A former director of national affairs at the American Jewish Committee and now an outspoken advocate of immigration reform, Steinlight tells his fellow Jews that they, along with the rest of America, face a momentous choice. If they turn away from their extreme immigration liberalism and help move America toward sensible immigration restrictions, the growth of the Moslem community in this country can be slowed substantially and even stopped, and a decent existence for the Jews themselves can be preserved. But if Jews and others continue in their embrace of open borders, in thirty years time the Jews will find themselves a besieged and powerless minority in an Islamic-dominated, anti-Semitic America.

That's what Steinlight is telling them. But will they listen? As he explains it, immigration to the U.S. in the early 20th century was literally a life or death matter for Jews-life for the immigrants, and death for those who stayed behind in Europe or who were closed out of America by the restrictive immigration policies of the 1920s and 1930s. For Jews, he says:

"(T)he immigration debate pits the heart against the head. In their gut, many feel that substantially reducing immigration betrays the legacy of their parents and grandparents. But a growing number believes that maintaining this policy betrays their children and grandchildren. The danger arises because mass immigration means importing mass anti-Semitism.... "

Yet, despite the dangers Moslem immigration poses to their security and their whole way of life, Jews have for the most part maintained their support for open immigration, and Steinlight by the end of his article does not seem very hopeful that they will change their minds-or at least that they will do so before it's too late to avoid disaster.

Loyalty to their ancestors' immigration "legacy" hardly seems a sufficient explanation for Jews' adherence to a policy that, as Steinlight puts it, spells the ultimate eclipse and ruin of Jewish life in this country, not to mention the ruin of America itself. After all, Jews in many cases betray without hesitation their grandparents' orthodox religious beliefs, and in other cases their grandparents' socialism, so why should their grandparents' immigrant history be so sacred to them? If we are to have any chance of converting the Jews from their open borders ideology, we must understand their own reasons for believing in it. From the following discussion, two basic perspectives on this problem will emerge, one pessimistic, the other optimistic.

First of all, as crazy as it may sound, there is something that many American Jews fear in their heart of hearts even more than they fear Moslem anti-Semitism, and that is white Christian anti-Semitism. Steinlight himself pointed to this phenomenon at a recent panel discussion hosted by the Center for Immigration Studies:

"Every high profile Jewish institution, whether it's a national organization or a major synagogue, is surrounded by concrete barriers to prevent car bombs exploding too close to the buildings. If you go through the lobbies into those buildings you have to pass metal detectors and double-doors of bulletproof glass. You are then frisked by security guards, mostly retired New York City police or Israeli agents, and then are scanned again with metal detectors.

"What is truly comic about this-were it not an instance in the theatre of the absurd, and were it not so appalling an indication of the kind of mass denial that is still governing major American Jewish organizations, including the one I used to work for that's currently meeting across the street-is that the staffs of these organizations pass the car bomb barriers, go through the double bulletproof glass lobbies, get frisked, then go upstairs into their offices and spend their days talking about the threats posed by evangelical Christians...."

Jews' risible obsession with non-existent evangelical Protestant anti-Semites, combined with their obliviousness to actual mass murdering Islamist anti-Semites (whom, moreover, the Jews' favored immigration policies have allowed into this country) is an amazing phenomenon that we should not dismiss as simply a bizarre ethnic idiosyncrasy. It expresses, rather, a central preoccupation of a significant number of Jews, namely their corrosive apprehension of what they think the goyim might one day do to them-a fear they entertain despite the fact that, apart from some social exclusions and other ethnic prejudices that existed up to the end of World War II, Jews have never faced serious anti-Semitism from the white Christian majority in this country.

Just the other week I was telling a secular, leftist Jew of my acquaintance, a man in his late sixties, about my idea (which I've proposed at FrontPage Magazine) that the only way to make ourselves safe from the specter of domestic Moslem terrorism is to deport all jihad-supporting Moslems from this country. He replied with emotion that if America deported Moslem fundamentalists, it would immediately start doing the same thing to Jews as well. "It's frightening, it's scary," he said heatedly, as if the Jews were already on the verge of being rounded up. In the eyes of this normally phlegmatic and easy-going man, America is just a shout away from the mass persecution, detention, and even physical expulsion of Jews. Given the wildly overwrought suspicions that some Jews harbor about the American Christian majority who are in fact the Jews' best friends in the world, it is not surprising that these Jews look at mass Third-World and Moslem immigration, not as a danger to themselves, but as the ultimate guarantor of their own safety, hoping that in a racially diversified, de-Christianized America, the waning majority culture will lack the power, even if it still has the desire, to persecute Jews.

The self-protective instinct to divide and weaken a potentially oppressive majority population may have served Jews well at certain times and places in the past when they truly were threatened. Under current circumstances-in America, the most philo-Semitic nation in the history of the world-it both morally wrong and suicidal. Not only are the open-borders Jews urging policies harmful to America's majority population, but, by doing so, they are surely triggering previously non-existent anti-Jewish feelings among them. The tragedy is that once a collective thought pattern gets deeply ingrained, as is the Jews' historically understandable fear of gentiles, it takes on a life of its own and becomes immune to evidence and reason.

This element of the Jewish psyche is further illumined by Norman Podhoretz in his memoir, My Love Affair with America:

"[M]y own view is that what had befallen the Jews of Europe inculcated a subliminal lesson. . . . The lesson was that anti-Semitism, even the relatively harmless genteel variety that enforced quotas against Jewish students or kept their parents from joining fashionable clubs or getting jobs in prestigious Wall Street law firms, could end in mass murder." [Emphasis added.]

While the idea Podhoretz expresses here is certainly familiar, it is familiar more as a parody of Jewish fears than as something Jews themselves have openly stated. For years, it's been a running joke among traditionalist conservatives, including those of Jewish background such as myself (and there are more right-wing Jews than people realize) that "any criticism of Jews is equated with Auschwitz." The complaint, I confess, had always seemed a just a tad hyperbolic. But if Podhoretz's portrayal of Jews' beliefs is correct, then the old parody, "Any criticism of Jews is a potential Auschwitz," turns out to be what the Jewish community has believed all along. What this means is that in the minds of Jews, any desire on the part of gentiles to maintain an all-gentile country club, or any statement by a Christian, no matter how mild and civilized, that shows any concern about any aspects of the cultural and political influence of secular Jews in American life, is an expression of anti-Jewish bigotry that could easily lead to mass extermination, and therefore it must be ruthlessly suppressed.

Please do not misunderstand me. I am not saying, as today's anti-Semites are constantly saying, that concerns about anti-Semitism are nothing but political correctness. Though it is still largely a fringe phenomenon, anti-Semitism and Israel-hatred in today's America are terribly real, having grown by leaps and bounds in some parts of the political spectrum since 9/11, as I have discussed at length at FrontPage Magazine (see here and here) and at my website, View from the Right (see here and here). Yet we must also note a tendency on the part of more than a few Jews to decry as anti-Semitic virtually any rational criticism of Jews, or any normal manifestations of gentile ethnocentrism, or even any strong expression of Christian religious belief. Think of the wild charges that were leveled against Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" by such prominent Jewish commentators as Charles Krauthammer, who characterized the movie as "a singular act of interreligious aggression ... spectacularly vicious ... the pre-Vatican II story of the villainous Jews," and William Safire, who said that audiences would leave the theater with no other thought than to look for Jews to punish for the death of Jesus. There was also the disturbing fact that Commentary, which in the past had always defended Christians and Christianity from false charges of anti-Semitism, approvingly reviewed James Carroll's virulently anti-Christian book, Constantine's Sword, which argues that the Christian religion is inherently anti-Semitic and the ultimate cause of the Nazi Holocaust.

The significance of the Jewish belief in a lurking anti-Semitism among white Christians is made clearer by another passage in My Love Affair With America:

"Acting on the principle that 'all bigotry is indivisible,' Jewish organizations such as the American Jewish Committee and the Anti-Defamation League, whose purpose was to defend Jews against discrimination and defamation, joined enthusiastically in the civil-rights movement, of which individual Jews were for a long time leaders and funders."

The principle that all bigotry is indivisible implies that all manifestations of ingroup/outgroup feeling (if we're speaking about the feelings of a gentile majority ingroup, that is) are essentially the same-and equally wrong. It says that if you're against one outgroup, you're against all outgroups. This denies the important truth that some outgroups (e.g., Mideastern Moslem fundamentalists) are much more different from the ingroup (e.g. America's Anglo-Protestant majority culture), and hence much less assimilable, and hence more legitimately excluded, than other outgroups (e.g., Italian Catholics or Ashkenazi Jews). The belief in the indivisibility of all bigotry makes it impossible to distinguish between degrees of bigotry or ethnocentrism. It makes it impossible to distinguish between immoral bigotry, meaning the desire to hurt some other group, and the legitimate defense of one's own people, their identity, and their interests. To erase such distinctions is the essence of political correctness, the reduction of all moral questions to a choice between "inclusion" and "hate."

Now, when Jews put together the idea that "all bigotry is indivisible," with the idea that "any social prejudice or exclusion directed against Jews leads potentially to Auschwitz," they must reach the conclusion that any exclusion of any minority group, no matter how alien it may be to the host society, is a potential Auschwitz.

So there it is. We have identified the core assumption that makes many liberal and neoconservative Jews keep pushing relentlessly for mass immigration, even the mass immigration of their mortal enemies. As these Jews see it, any immigration restrictions against Moslems would release a latent ethnocentrism in the white American majority that would then turn instantly against the Jews. To state this thought process in the baldest terms, these Jews believe that if philo-Semitic white gentiles exclude Jew-hating Moslems from America, it would lead those same gentiles to commit another Jewish Holocaust.

Even if they don't take it to the absurd point of envisioning a Jewish Holocaust or some other anti-Jewish persecution in this country, various Jewish writers and spokesmen have continued to express a deeply suspicious attitude towards white Christian America. In the cover article of the November 1999 issue of Commentary, entitled "California and the End of White America," Ron Unz predicted that if the current non-European immigrants fail to assimilate, the danger will not be an uprising of unassimilated immigrant cultures, but an eruption of white nationalism. "[W]e face the very real threat of future movements along the lines of Proposition 187, each worse than the last, and on a national scale," Unz wrote. "There are few forces that could so easily break America as the coming of white nationalism." [Emphasis added.] Amazing. Multiculturalism and minority group-rights movements are tearing apart America's once unitary, individual-rights-based polity, as Commentary itself has been lamenting for years, while America's declining white majority has been reacting with what can only be called pusillanimous passivity in the face of this systematic attack on their country.

But now it turns out that what Commentary most fears is not the minority group-rights movement, but any possible resistance by white Americans to it, a resistance Commentary demonizes as "white nationalism." In other words, open-borders Jews fear a totally non-existent white defense of America more than they fear the actual realities of mass legal and illegal immigration, multiculturalism, Mexican irredentism, Moslem jihadism, and all the rest of the forces that are threatening our country. For anyone who shares this view, it follows that the quicker America's white majority is reduced to a minority by continued mass immigration, and the quicker America's majority culture is pushed aside by immigrant cultures, the better off America will be.

While the disturbing attitudes I have been describing constitute a definite strand in the American Jewish sensibility, as well in the sensibility of liberals generally, I find it hard to believe that most Jews or even most politically active Jews are so paranoid about white gentiles' potential for committing anti-Jewish oppression that they are driven to the insane expedient of supporting mass Moslem immigration in order to forestall that oppression. There is a more moderate-and more hopeful-way of explaining the Jews' attachment to Third-World immigration.

The Jewish experience in the modern world could be understood as a series of attempts by Jews to free themselves from the historic burden of Jewishness, the fierce social disabilities that had been imposed on them for centuries. As Paul Johnson writes in his History of the Jews, the Jewish Communists of the 19th century ("non-Jewish Jews," as he calls them) saw in Communism the end of national and ethnic identities for all mankind, and thus the end of the Jewish ethnic identity, and thus the liberation of the Jews from the age-old curse of anti-Jewish prejudice. To seek to overturn entire societies in order to get rid of one's own ethnic identity may seem a rather drastic approach to solving the Jewish problem, yet it reflects, in a uniquely exacerbated and destructive form, Jews' recurrent pattern of forming some global ideology for reasons relating to their particular situation as Jews. (Let us note that this tendency, while it can take negative forms as in the current example, is natural for a people whose tribal history and beliefs became the basis for all of Western civilization.)

In America, Jews discovered a more reasonable approach to the Jewish problem: liberal individualism. Under liberal individualism, only the individual and his rights matter and each person's ethnicity is irrelevant, or, in any case, as irrelevant as he wants it to be. As Milton Gordon wrote in his important 1964 book Assimilation in American Life, mid-twentieth century American society combined cultural assimilation, in which people of all backgrounds participate as individuals in a common public culture (the workplace, the schools, political life and so on), with structural pluralism, in which people tend to organize their residential patterns and social and religious lives along ethnic lines. This unique American arrangement allowed Jews a measure of social belonging, economic and professional success, and "at-home-ness" that they had not experienced since the destruction of the Second Temple, or perhaps ever in their history.

But starting in the 1960s, Jews, and liberals generally, took the good idea of liberal individualism too far. The very idea of a common culture, which they had previously seen as the pathway to success and belonging in America, started to seem discriminatory to them, since it implied that some peoples and cultures could fit into the common culture while others couldn't. A common culture also implied the existence of common standards of behavior, derived from America's declining WASP majority, to which people were expected to conform; and Jews in particular, after having eagerly adopted those standards in previous generations, began, in the liberatory afflatus of the Sixties, to find them stifling. Jews and other liberals thus turned from the moderate tolerance of mid-twentieth century America to what might be called tolerance absolutism, an attitude that delegitimized any notion of a common American culture or moral tradition (other than the tradition of liberalism itself), because shared cultural allegiances and moral norms would place limits on the individual self or the ethnic group.

This radicalized liberalism made Jews feel even safer-and freer to express themselves as Jews-than before. Having realized the model of "pure-non-discrimination-and-individual-rights-without-a-majority-culture" as the very basis of their unprecedented success, freedom, and happiness in America, Jews saw that model as not only advantageous to themselves personally, but as advantageous to everyone-indeed, as the highest political truth. It didn't occur to them that the radical individualist model worked so well for them because they are a uniquely high-achieving people operating in a still intact Western society. It didn't occur to them that the model might not work so well for less capable or less assimilable people in a society without a cohesive common culture, such as America was now becoming due to the tolerance absolutism that was supported by the Jews themselves. It didn't occur to them that both the intactness and the liberalism of the society would be threatened if the liberalism were taken too far.

Their belief that radical individualism is true for all mankind is thus for liberal secular Jews a crux of faith, an emotional prop to make sense of the world, and a key component of their identity as a people. More than any pragmatic calculus, it is the reason they bitterly resent any criticism of the liberal ideology and voraciously crave attempts to vindicate it, whether by assimilating Third-World immigrants, democratizing Moslem countries, or liquidating traditional values founded upon the restraint of individual desire. (Consider, for example, the Jewish community's extraordinary degree of support for homosexual marriage, far more extensive than that of any other ethnic or religious group-a uniquely ironic outcome for the first major people in history who saw homosexuality as an abomination to God.)

What the Jews need to see-what they can't help but see under the encroaching reality of jihad in America-is that, like any good idea, the good idea of non-discrimination can be carried too far. The moderate non-discrimination that allowed Jews to thrive in America did not have to be taken to the point of absolute non-discrimination, which required us to open our borders and our culture to unassimilable and hostile aliens, which in turn must result in the disarming and destruction of the society itself.

Notwithstanding the horrific problems created by the open-immigration ideology, I call this the optimistic view of Jewish support for open immigration because it assumes, not an endemic Jewish oppositionalism to America's majority culture, but a correctable misperception stemming from Jews' unique history. Having experienced the liberal paradigm of individual rights and non-discrimination as the recipe for their own earthly salvation after centuries of misery and persecution, Jews have, understandably though mistakenly, carried that ideology to an extreme where it threatens the very country that provided the Jews those protections and benefits in the first place. This is so patently irrational from the point of view of the Jews' own self-interest that they cannot help but eventually see it, if it is clearly and firmly pointed out to them.

So, while Stephen Steinlight is to be applauded for his efforts to convert his fellow Jews to a sane immigration policy, he needs to recognize that they are bound to their belief in open borders by a larger set of emotional and political attachments than a reluctance to "betray their grandparents." He also needs to recognize that even if, under the pressure of immediate fears of Islamism in America, Jews back off from their open borders ideology, their conversion is unlikely to be very deep. A full and principled abandonment of modern liberalism by liberals and especially by Jews is not to be expected. Just as the Israelis will fight remorselessly against the Arabs when absolutely necessary, and then, as soon as the fighting briefly subsides, instantly turn back once again to the utopian hopes of the "peace-process," American Jews in the face of an imminent Islamist threat may support some kind of tightening of immigration laws, only to revert to their accustomed liberalism the moment that the immediate sense of intolerable danger is past. It is unrealistic to expect any final victory in this area. Liberalism is the organizing ideology of modern society, but for secular Jews (and the great majority of American Jews are essentially secular), it is a sacred trust toward which they feel the same zealous devotion that their religious brethren feel toward their covenant with God.

Okay. This is really heady stuff. It just so happens that last night I attempted to post a very long, honest, well-argued, and relatively unemotional response to an anti-Jewish, anti-Zionist diatribe of Joe Sobran's (y'sh"v!) posted by rightwing Catholics on the religion board. After typing for probably over half an hour I clicked "post" only to learn that the thread had been pulled. This article, criticizing Jewish liberalism from a conservative Jewish perspective, offers a more pleasant opportunity to make the same points and ask the same questions.

The real object of Jewish fears

What delicious sarcasm! It's about time that someone other than the evangelicals themselves mentioned this absurdity. But it doesn't go far enough.

First, when it comes to the distinction between the Jews and Goyei Ha'Aretz (the nations of the earth), ALL non-Jews are Goyim. This includes Arabs, moslems, Blacks, Hispanics, pygmies, Australian aborigines, etc. It is most strange and inappropriate that only certain non-Jews are considered "goyim" while so many others are apparently "honorary Jews."

Second, it is absolutely amazing that the term "chr*stian" has been narrowed to the point where it applies only to rural Anglo-American folk Protestants (and, on occasion, to the Western European and North American sections of the Catholic Church). The fact that so many Jews who "hate evangelical chr*stianity" are absolutely in love with American Blacks (whose non-classification as "fundamentalists," "evangelicals," and apparently even as "chr*stians" is apparently a matter of melanin). Of course, this ludicrous belief in a sophisticated liberal Black folk culture is not limited to Jewish liberals. His Bloatedness, Ted Kennedy, once famously declaimed that if the "chr*stian right" had its way evolution could not be taught in schools and Blacks could not sit at lunch counters (Nat Turner and Darwin--what a match!), and even "palaeoconservative" superhero H. L. Mencken (may his name be blotted out!), the famous defamer of Southern fundamentalists at Dayton, was a big fan of Southern fundamentalists with black skins. Evidently there is something profoundly disturbing about white people acting like "savages" by believing in the supernatural that turns the stomachs of liberal lovers of "people of color."

In a similar vain(sp?), how many liberal Jewishs horrified by Gibson's film would be seized by orgiastic ecstasy at the prospect of "quaint" Mexican peasants literally crucifying themselves in a frenzy of illiterate folk-Catholicism? The "anti-chr*stianity" of these Jews simply cannot be what it claims to be, else snake-handling Black Baptists and self-crucifying Mexican peasants (both of whom probably all believe that all Jews must either convert or be eternally damned) would not be looked on as common victims of the hideous redneck.

As a redneck Noachide who came to Torah not out of a rejection of my own heritage or an attraction to "cosmopolitanism" or "urbanity" but simply because it is the authentic Biblical revelation, I have my own idiosyncratic and otherwise unheard of reason for this selective "anti-chr*stianism" of American Jewish liberals.

The fact is that rural American folk Protestants are hated by liberal Jews because they more than any other people remind them of who their ancestors really were. Rural, heathen-killing farmers named Caleb and Jedidiah cannot help but make modern liberal Jews, and even some Jews who are not so liberal, uncomfortable.

Rightwing anti-Jewish chr*stians (the real ones, I mean) are not the only people who take comfort from the claim that Judaism is not the original Hebrew religion of the Bible and that Judaism began two thousand years ago as a new religion (based not on Sinai but on the rejection of the claims of the Nazarene, and maybe even the TaNa"KH itself) by a new people made up exclusively of sophisticated scholars (never mind that the Talmud probably has more to say about agriculture than any other religious work in history). Now liberal secular Jews, and even some overly sophisticated urban and professional Orthodox Jews, can safely write off all those unpleasant, intolerant, and "irrational" commandments such as wars of extermination against evil nations and the performance of animal sacrifices.

It is because the "rednecks" love them that so many Jews hate the "rednecks." The idea of some yokel looking at them with starry eyed admiration for a descendant of the Biblical Joshua sends them into paroxysms. "That wasn't us! We only appear like that on the surface! If understood correctly Joshua was actually a pasty-skinned harmless little scholar who would never even have eaten meat!" Or sometimes these uncomfortable things about Judaism, REAL Judaism, are dismissed by being simply attributed to chr*stianity altogether (like the six day creation, Theocracy, and the Ten Commandments). Is it any wonder that liberal Jews, and some not so liberal Jews, go to extreme lengths to distance themselves from anything so associated with the "naive" Charlton Heston-inspired view of Jewishness that Obadiah and his wife Jemimah have?

Jews have been too long away from the Land of Israel in more ways than one. It wasn't enough merely to move there and set up homes and offices that could have existed just as well and in more safety in Manhattan. Jews must return to the "unsophisticated" proto-redneck qualities of their decidedly non-cosmopolitan ancestors. There must be not only Jewish doctors and lawyers in Israel but Jewish farmers and shepherds--not the secular socialists of the early "pioneering" days but people dedicated to G-d and His Eternal Torah. Perhaps the restored Messianic Israel will be a pre-industrial, agrarian society; who knows? There are already groups and individuals who advocate the restoration of the Sanhedrion and the Temple. There is even an organization trying to restore the ancient Biblical clothing and dress of the ancient Jews. Why are so many even Orthodox Jews uncomfortable with these things? Is it because it punctures a centuries old false image of aloof scholarly sophistication??? Huh? Is it????

Finally, maybe Jews will even have to abandon the non-Jewish names that are so identified as "Jewish" which they have worn only since about the time of Napoleon and return to both Hebrew names and the authentic form of Jewish names (peloni ben 'almoni).

The goal of true Torah Zionism is not "progress" but reaction, the turning back of the clock eventually to the reentering of the Garden of Eden. To stop at merely moving there and fail to continue the return to the ancient authentic Jewish life is not Zionism at all.

Many Jews (even some Orthodox) are hostile to rural Bible-banging Theocratic heathen-killing "yahoos" because they are running away from their own past. And if "quintessential Jews" are named Irving and Shirley and are bankers or attorneys or business magnates in New York City (and by extension project this view of Yiddishkeit onto their ancient Biblical ancestors and the contemporary Yishuv) then who can blame so many non-Jews for assuming the same stereotypes?

In other words, maybe Irving and Shirley's problem with Obadiah and Jemimah and their farm is that they themselves are not named Obadiah and Jemimah and raising sacrificial animals and crops in the Holy Land.

I know my view will be dismissed by many as naive in the extreme and I will be told that the "swords and sandals" view of the ancient Jews so many Obadiahs and Jemimahs have is based on an unfamiliarity with the Oral Torah (though the Oral Torah is itself "retro" in the extreme). I will answer that this may be true, but Obadiah's and Jemimah's naive "chr*stian-viewed" Jews would have expelled the goyim, reinstituted the Sanhedrion, and rebuilt the Temple by now. Perhaps all the Irvings and Shirleys (the liberals and the not-so-liberals) hold the greatest antipathy for Obadiah and Jemimah because no other people so reminds them of their miserable failure to do their duty.

PS: As an afterthought, has anyone noticed that the current "religious fanatic" character (complete with a twisted sort of cross) in World Wrestling Entertainment is named MORDEKHAI?????

"Palaeozionism"

re: Okay. This is really heady stuff.)))

Zionist--Indeed, a very intriguing piece of writing. One of the few I'm downloading to a permanent file. Recent months have brought about a certain change in my own beliefs about what can and cannot be accomplished in the matter of saving Israel--and I've come to the conclusion that it cannot be saved without the leadership of Jews themselves. And I don't mean the handful of conservatives that come to FR.

In their interest in keeping Israel alive and breathing, conservatives (mostly Christian conservatives, here) cannot save Jews over the resistance and maddening resentment of the majority of Jewry--which is liberal. It's like trying to pull someone out of a burning building who insists upon clinging to the furniture and lecturing you on how much he dislikes Baptists.

Thoughtomator---In trying to deal with this resentment, it will be very easy for the Christian to get resentful himself. I, for one, am very sore over the insults that came the way of well-meaning Christians this past spring over the Passion flap. I have ceased to read Krauthammer, and will never take him seriously again. If you are tired of being evangelized (I suppose someone is inviting you to church, I don't happen to do this)--I am tired to death about hearing about how Great Uncle Issy was blackballed at some Connecticut country club in the fifties, and how that will forever prevent happiness in America. Understand that this complaint is generally made in front of the non-country club set and is rude on its face. And don't mention the "H" word for at least the first hour of conversation. Better yet, get through a whole evening without it. You have your demands, maybe others have their own.

Hostile--I pinged you because I was going to mention your assertion that liberal Jewry does not fear to support Kerry because, even though they know that Bush is very much pro-Israel, they also take for granted that Kerry won't throw the Jews to the Islamic wolves in Israel. Your POV stuck with me.

Hostile--Does liberal Jewry regard the pro-Israel, non-Jewish (who will have to be mostly Christian) American as a sort of ever-dependable shabbas goy? I do not believe taking support for granted is any kind of safe--not anymore. Not with how things are in Europe. Things are changing, and changing quickly. Rhetoric that worked once, is not working now.

And Kerry won't throw the Jews to the wolves. He's too dim and silly to do much of anything--not to mention lazy. He'll just let Israel fall apart slowly. There is nothing in his attitude, words, or history to indicate that he'd trouble himself over Israel's troubles.

Being Pro-Palestinian is so very fashionable among the Hollywood and Hamptons set that Kerry lazes in...reminds me of Norman Mailer and his pet murderer. What makes anyone thing that Kerry would play to the concerns of Christian conservatives? And he's not exactly courting Leiberman for veep.

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