The Importance of Israel

Sometimes, tragically, it brings out the worst. A case in point: the finger-pointing in the wake of the September 11 terror attacks, seeking to blame the atrocities on America's supposedly misguided support for Israel — and on Jewish Americans who supposedly manipulate the system to tilt our policy the wrong way.

No, it's not a national groundswell. You hear it mainly on the margins, and if past experience is a guide, it will stay there. Still, the variety and persistence of the finger-pointers is startling: left-wing professors in California, right-wing fanatics in Idaho, Arab-American activists in Michigan, smart-alec journalists in New York. There's enough of it to be worrying.

In reply, important voices are being raised from within the Jewish community, declaring that the attacks and the hatred behind them have nothing to do with America's support for Israel. Osama bin Laden and his ilk are motivated, we are reminded, by larger, more global issues: suspicion of modernity, secularism, democracy and the Western civilization that champions them. On the policy plane, his passion is driving American troops off the holy soil of Arabia. Israel isn't on his screen, except perhaps tangentially, as one more example of the West's corrupting influence.

The fact is, things are a bit more complicated than that. Bin Laden and his allies are driven, above all, by an extremist version of fundamentalist Islam. And Islam, as many of those same defenders of Israel have noted countless times, regards the mere existence of a Jewish state in the Middle East as a cardinal theological challenge. Indeed, pessimists in the pro-Israel community have been pointing for decades to the power of Islam's territorial imperative as a reason to dismiss Israel-Arab peacemaking as impossibly naïve. It's hard to see how that reading squares with the notion that the world's most dangerously fanatical Islamist just isn't interested in Israel.

But we needn't search the theology texts to divine bin Laden's motives. He's spelled them out repeatedly in various public statements. He's on a self-declared holy war against "Crusaders and Jews," with a three-fold goal: "liberating" Mecca and the rest of Arabia from American "occupation," "liberating" Al-Aqsa in Jerusalem from Jewish "occupation" and lifting the Western embargo on Iraq. They're always stated in that three-fold form, and usually in that order.

The fact is, Israel is one of the issues, though not the only one, driving bin Laden and his cohorts. It is foolish to deny it; that merely undermines the credibility of Israel's defenders at a time when Israel sorely needs defending. The best defense is always the truth.

And the truth is that America and Israel are allies, not because of some cabal of Jewish lobbyists, but because their two peoples demand it. America's support for Israel is not misguided, but profoundly moral. America and Israel share a deep community of values. They are partners in the democratic enterprise, cities on a hill devoted to something larger than themselves. Both are imperfect, at times painfully so. Both become impatient when their imperfections are pointed out. Still, both are societies striving to represent the better nature of humankind, and for that reason they deserve defending.

If America's defense of her values sometimes puts her on the firing line, then that's the right place to be. That's not a hard case to make. Most Americans, like most Israelis, understand it instinctively.

You straight out lied Calm down, calm down. The heifer will be here soon and your buddies can kill it at the age of three, burn the lot with dung and a scarlet thread. And the temple will be rebuilt and Jesus will come again. And he'll be real pleased with you for playing such an important part in His return. (how could the Lord come if the cow wasn't the right colour! Oy! Martin Luther, you're not.) That'll make you feel much more important than the guy who couldn't quite make into Bob Jones University (what a challenge that must be) and then diluted his US birthright by swearing fealty to another power. You're a real case study in self-delusion.

So what did I lie about?

First you play 20 Questions. "Just what right to vote am I holding behind my back?" It's pretty easy to answer, even without checking your home page.

What, you want to see if I can spell Druze correctly? You want the percentage of christian arabs to moslem voters inside Isreal? You want an enumeration of the -- what is it? -- ten seats they get in the knesset? You want to see if I know the fine-print of Israeli election law?

That means you don't have to debate principle, just play trick questions.

I notice you don't address my real point: that the palestinians don't get to vote. Yet you DID get to vote. A useful idiot prepared to take up arms against people who never did you anything to you or yours gets to vote, and the folks whose ancestors lived there don't.

I don't know if it's self-righteousness or ignorant arrogance that is your best characteristic.

So what did I lie about it? Exactly. Refresh my memory. If recollection serves, you're the once who can't address the truth state on. You're the one who said in an earlier post: "Funny, I'm not Jewish and I got to vote. Go figure." But then you admit that joining the Army (and serving under a foreign flag) earned you citizenship of the JEWISH STATE. So you're the clintonesque, parse-every-word bullsh*t artist (whoops, sorry, red-heifer-sh*t aritist). And the amazing thing is, you think everyone is no brighter than you. Used car salesmen and televangelists love guys like you, Mr. I-won't kill-christians-at-easter, no matter what is in your country's best interests as defined by your superior officers. You're better than the funny pages -- and every bit as two-dimensional.

The only lies told here have been yours. And, you tell them mostly to yourself. At least you picked a gullible audience.

There was an interesting, civil thread going until you DenisW, Lent and the other shrieking harpies turned up flinging accusations of "anti-semitism" and Jew-hater around and insisting that the U.S. -- the country where you were born, for godsake -- is here mainly because God wanted Israel to have a dumb, muscular, rich big brother.

I wonder if you know the Yiddish word I'm thinking of to describe you? (You won't find a clue on my home page, either). Thanks for keeping up your end (however low) of this debate. You're a reminder to anyone who reads it just how intellectually bankrupt one side is. Just out of curiosity, was it Bob Jones who used to see the 800-foot Jesus?

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