Posted on 08/30/2005 12:38:16 PM PDT by Ooh-Ah
Did an ABC staffer insert the following lines in an email sent by celebrity antiwar mother Cindy Sheehan?
''Am I emotional? Yes, my firstborn was murdered. Am I angry? Yes, he was killed for lies and for a Neo-Con agenda to benefit Israel. My son joined the Army to protect America, not Israel." That is what Sheehan is claiming.
If you don't believe that explanation -- if you don't believe an ABC staffer set about to put anti-Semitic words into Cindy Sheehan's mouth -- then your hero, my liberal friends, is a raging, ignorant anti-Semite. Sorry, but what are you doing hanging with that crowd?
I am as sympathetic to Cindy Sheehan's loss as the next mother. When I heard of her plight, while on vacation with my own children, my heart ached. Why not simply meet with her, I thought -- and wrote, like the other liberal columnists -- instead of going on a bike ride to nowhere?
I am the last person to "swift boat" a mother who lost her son in this war. I don't blame anyone, man or woman, for being "emotional." I have certainly seen the charge used to belittle women many too many times, myself included, with less justification than in this case.
But I will not stand silent and see anti-Semitism masked as opposition to Israel and Israel blamed for George Bush's mistakes, if that's what they are. She did say this, apparently:
"What they're saying, too, is like, it's OK for Israel to have nuclear weapons. But Iran or Syria better not get nuclear weapons. ... It's OK for Israel to occupy Palestine ... for the United States to occupy Iraq, but it's not OK for Syria to be in Lebanon. They're a bunch of (expletive) hypocrites."
Anyone who cannot tell the difference, in any terms, between Israel on the one hand and Syria and Iran on the other is not someone who, as my grandmother would put it, is "good for the Jews" -- or for the country, I'd like to add.
I have been speaking to Jewish groups around the nation for the last year, and this is what I have been warning them. It will come to this: Israel will be blamed, which means Jews will be blamed.
There are some who resist these equations. They pretend they can blame Israel, the only Jewish state in the world, a state created out of the dust of 6 million Jews murdered, and say it has nothing to do with Jews. I do not believe this. I am not from the powerless generation of the Holocaust, the ones who watched the newsreels of the children on the S.S. St. Louis being turned away, because American Jews couldn't get their cousins in -- but the next one.
Go to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, and on your second visit, spend time in my favorite room, the one with the newspapers that make clear what everyone knew. My generation does politics, but we are not so powerful as to control George Bush. Hardly. More power rests in the gas tank.
It is ludicrous to suggest that Casey died for Israel, but it is worse to lionize Cindy Sheehan without confronting the anti-Semitism that seems to be accepted not even beneath the surface. If her allies really believe ABC was out to frame her, where is the investigation? Where is the staffer who could include such language? And what of the equation of Israel with Syria and Iran, a statement too foolish to debate? Why isn't anyone concerned about that?
Or, rather, why is it only the right?
There are lots of people in the middle right now, watching bad news streaming out of Iraq, watching Marine National Guardsmen who weren't supposed to be serving, much less dying, coming home in boxes. There seems to be no end in sight. Two of the first Republicans to urge the president to meet with Cindy Sheehan were both likely 2008 presidential contenders, Chuck Hagel and George Allen.
Symbols matter. For better or for worse, they help to define movements.
If the "antiwar movement" in America is defined, even remotely, as an anti-Israel movement, it will fail. That is certain to me.
If I believed in conspiracy theories, I'd think that the right would like nothing better than to have Cindy Sheehan lead it for just that reason.
They might be laughing all the way to the bank about the embrace of her by the so-called liberal media.
To tell the truth, it's just what I'm afraid of.
To find out more about Susan Estrich, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at www.creators.com.
"Jessie Jackson called NYC HYMIETOWN (1984) and Ali AL'Sharpton called for the MURDER of Jews TWICE (early 1990s) at rallies in NYC.
Jew Hatred is a long standing staple in the Democrat Party"
And most of the Jews I've known are liberal democrats. Go figure.
I wonder if Susan knows that David Duke and the cretins at Stormfront are big Crazy Cindy fans.
Did you *read* the article?
If so, please point out a lie.
Very few people did, apparently. Far easier to simply post a pic of Susan next to an alien.
I listened to that interview on Laura Ingraham. Made my day! I laughed about it all the way to work!
When you read the history books you can say you knew Casey's mother.
Hah, great minds. I had exactly the same thought when I head it earlier. Neil Conan is hardly a conservative bogeyman. She had indicated she would be on for the entire segment and take calls, and she bolten when the mere suggestion of an off the script question reared its head, just as she did with Tony Snow. Her handlers are getting worried.
Bah. With all the attention on NO, I can just see her jumping up and down saying, "Look at me, look at me."
Just watch c-span Washington Journal. this pllus the PNAC, Neocon diatribe has guests frankly looking into the camera and saying "You just don't like Jews" almost every day. If Dems lose the Jews, they are done!
It irritates me when conservatives resort to the "she's ugly" defense. One of the things that attracted me to conservatism was that your ideas were the most important thing. Liberals think the wrapper is more important than the contents, but conservatives are only concerned about what's inside.
And yes, I'm ugly.
How about when she ignorantly stated that Bush is killing our soldiers because he has alrady killed our soldiers! This woman is history all right! She's done!
The "antiwar movement" already is anti-Israel, not to mention anti-American. It's a standard communist front "peace movement" that defines peace as "America defeated".
Everyone keeps making the mistake of trying to make rational sense out of Cindi who is a babbling idiot...she will say ANYTHING from one day to the next just to get her mug in front of a camera. We used to have a President and first lady like that...right?
There is nothing more fun than watching a Jewish Liberal twisting and turning when one of their favorite Liberal mouthpieces ends up being as anti-Semitic as Hitler! Well, maybe just as much fun as watching the same Jewish Liberal having to deal with a Conservative who is more pro-Israel than they, especially when that Conservative is a Born-Again Christian!
Not picking a fight, T, but I've seen your picture and you are not ugly.
Are we, republicans, libertarians, freepers, conservatives, that crowd?? We're the raging anti-semites, too? Wow. How does she not get the disconnect in her words, the contradiction?
Wake up, Susan. American and European liberals are “that crowd.
She and so many others on the left can really delude themselves and distort reality. The Cindys on the left are the anti-semites, much the same way the lefties went after John Robert's kids calling them gay and bashing their adoptions. Then, out of the other side of their mouths, claiming compassion toward minorities and gays.
Every now and then, Estrich says something that actually makes sense. And then there are the times when she says something that is so abysmally stupid that I want to reach into my TV and throttle her.
The only people who ever try to blame the Jews or Israel are the dems!
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