Posted on 04/20/2002 11:05:09 AM PDT by scratchgolfer
Israel Winning Broad Support From U.S. Right
ALISON MITCHELL
Gary L. Bauer, the Christian conservative who grew up as a janitor's son in Kentucky, and William Kristol, the scion of New York Jewish intellectuals, long ago forged an unlikely but close friendship as warriors of the right.
They have fought together on issues like promoting family values and the Supreme Court nomination of Clarence Thomas. But the cause that now rivets them both is Israel, and their joint, consuming devotion to it illustrates the deep pro-Israel sentiment in the conservative movement.
The support comes from a broad band of people, from the national security-minded hawks who view Israel as the only democratic and dependable United States ally in the Middle East to religious conservatives who believe Israel is the covenant land promised to Jews by God.
Many of the conservative thinkers who influence the part of the party that President Bush considers his base have become loudly critical of his efforts at Middle East peace-making, calling them a muddled mission that undercuts his post-Sept. 11 antiterrorist doctrine.
The strongly pro-Israel sentiment marks a profound and telling shift inside the Republican Party, political strategists say. With Jews mostly voting Democratic, Republican presidents for decades had been freer to break with Israel. Dwight D. Eisenhower refused to back a British, French and Israeli attack on Egypt after it nationalized the Suez Canal. Mr. Bush's father's administration repeatedly clashed with Israel.
But now, Mr. Bauer, 55, the president of a research organization called American Values, often presses Israel's case in a daily e-mail message that makes its way to about 100,000 Christian conservatives. Mr. Kristol, 49, who edits The Weekly Standard, has criticized Mr. Bush's Middle East policy in his magazine and in memorandums fired off by the Project for the American Century, a foreign policy research group that he heads.
"We think you can't have a peace process in which one of the partners is a sponsor of terrorism," Mr. Kristol said. "Not if you're engaged in a serious war on terrorism."
They are far from alone. From Jewish neoconservatives like Mr. Kristol to Christian and social conservatives like Mr. Bauer, from the free-market conservatives of The Wall Street Journal editorial page to the talk radio host Rush Limbaugh, has come the same sharp message.
"Suddenly the president who soared by standing on principle seems to have been replaced by an impostor who's lost his foreign-policy bearings," The Journal said in its lead editorial earlier this week as Secretary of State Colin L. Powell came home from the Middle East empty-handed.
National Review, another keeper of the conservative flame, in its May 6 issue says "the administration has leaked away prestige and credibility with nearly every statement."
The seeds for the new Republican thinking were planted under Ronald Reagan when his robust anticommunism and advocacy of a strong missile defense drew to his side a group of influential, pro-Israel neoconservatives from the Democratic Party like Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, his United Nations ambassador, and Richard Perle, an assistant secretary of defense.
Mr. Reagan, who was strongly pro-Israel, also paved the way for the ascendancy of the Christian right inside the Republican Party. In what is now considered a seminal moment in the building of the Republican coalition, Mr. Reagan gave religious conservatives an honored place in the party by declaring before a convention of evangelical preachers, "You can't endorse me, but I endorse you."
The trends Mr. Reagan set in motion have only escalated, and Mr. Bush now has to contend with an even more dramatically altered Republican Party.
"For the first time in probably the history of the Republican Party a significantly pro-Israel constituency has to catch the eye of the White House," said Marshall Wittmann, who has an unusual perspective as a Jewish conservative who was once a lobbyist for the Christian Coalition.
Republicans attribute the conservative support for Israel to many factors, including the influence of largely Jewish neoconservatives and the rise of the Christian right, with its belief that the Bible mandates support for Israel. The Likud Party in Israel also built ties to conservatives. After the Sept. 11 attacks, other conservatives who embrace a hawkish foreign policy came to see a stand with Israel as important strategy in the war against terrorism.
The departure from Republican ranks of Patrick J. Buchanan and his followers also muted the voices of conservatives who were more critical of Israel.
"That was the part of the movement most skeptical of Israel and most pro-Arab," said Richard Lowry, the editor of National Review. "They are effectively out of the picture.'
Mr. Buchanan advocated closer ties between the United States and Iraq and Iran, and his past writings were criticized by some as anti-Semitic, a charge he vehemently denied. In the 1960's and earlier, the conservative movement included elements, like the John Birch Society, that were viewed as anti-Jewish.
These elements, too, have waned. Still, at times there are tensions in the pro-Israel alliance over issues like the proselytizing of Jews by fundamentalist Christians. In a recently released tape of a 1972 conversation, the Rev. Billy Graham agreed with President Richard M. Nixon that left-wing Jews dominated the news media. In an apology, Mr. Graham, now 83, said he should have disagreed with Mr. Nixon.
The pro-Israel constituency in Congress is now so broad that it transcends both party and ideology, with Representative Tom DeLay of Texas, the staunchly conservative House majority whip teaming up with Representative Tom Lantos, a Democrat of California, to introduce a resolution of solidarity with Israel.
"You have one of the most interesting political marriages of all times between the largely Jewish neoconservatives and the religious right in firm support for Israel, embodied by Bill Kristol and Gary Bauer," Mr. Wittmann said.
In fact the trajectory of the two says a lot about how the conservative movement came to support Israel.
Well before Mr. Kristol became one of Washington's most prodigious merchants of conservative ideas, his father, Irving, was an intellectual warrior from perches at journals and magazines like Commentary, Encounter and The Public Interest. He was the prototypical neoconservative who shifted from left to right as the Democratic Party moved from Hubert H. Humphrey to George McGovern.
Mr. Kristol followed in his father's footsteps. In 1972, as a student at Harvard College, he says, he handed out leaflets for Senator Henry M. Jackson's 1972 presidential run. But Mr. Jackson, a Democrat devoted to a strong military, suffered a string of defeats.
"I was generally for American strength and generally for American support for democracies around the world," Mr. Kristol said. "Support for Israel was part of that."
But soon his views led him to migrate to the Republican Party, where he eventually was chief of staff to Vice President Dan Quayle.
Mr. Kristol met Mr. Bauer when the two worked under William J. Bennett, in the Reagan Education Department, and fought together for ideas like bringing traditional family values into the classroom. They became such fast friends that for more than a decade their families have vacationed together at the Delaware shore.
Mr. Bauer, who ran unsuccessfully for the Republican presidential nomination in 2000, came to support of Israel from a different route than Mr. Kristol and represents a different strand of conservatism. "I'm a little different than some of my Republican friends," Mr. Bauer says, "in the sense that I know what it's like to grow up in a family where the paycheck lasts until about Wednesday and the bills last until Friday."
He became a Reaganite in high school when he saw Mr. Reagan's speech in 1964 on behalf of Barry Goldwater.
Mr. Bauer's support for Israel, he says, stems from both theology and ideology. "As an evangelical," he said, "I do believe the Bible is pretty clear that the land is what is called covenant land, that God made a covenant with the Jews that that would be their land."
But he also calls the United States and Israel "mutual allies" in a cold-war-style struggle between radical Islam and Western democracies.
For all their many long talks over the years, Mr. Kristol and Mr. Bauer cannot recall when they discovered their mutual commitment to Israel. But Mr. Kristol remembers asking his friend what kind of reaction his e-mail messages on the Middle East drew from his followers.
"He said, `They agree with me, and they are actually quite impassioned about it,' " Mr. Kristol recalled. "It was the first tipoff to me that it wasn't just that a lot of religious conservatives are pro-Israel, but that it was an important issue for them."
The article is arrogant, posing by omission that one wouldn't have views unless they fit into a certain defined grouping. Defining seems to be an important project for the NY Times, part of the identity politics infecting American political thought.
A variety of people across the "spectrum" have views on the middle east, and varied as to certain incidents and events.
I support Israel because I am opposed to terrorism
I support Israel because their enemies have the same mindset as our enemeies, a hatred of people for having a different religion.
I support Israel because unlike its foes it is a democracy and western in nature. And democracy and western culture are not the worst parts of this world (as the left would like us to think) they are the best
I support Israel the Marxists support the Palestinains as well as , sadly, a few on the right. Some who come by it honestly, but sadly many others who just plain hate Jewish people and give us a bad name.
I support Israel because they do not target civilians, while their enemies do (no matter what liars say otherwise)
I support Israel because their enemies danced in the streets while our people were savagely murdered.
I support Israel because I don't think that their enemies' poverty is an excuse to act like animals (anymore than I think America's poor are entitled to use such an excuse)
And unlike the Marxists I don't feel that Palestinian poverty is the result of Israel's "oppression" (oh please!) it is the result of their inferior Islamocentric culture.
I support Israel because Israelis want to live in peace but the ragheads won't leave them alone.
Bottom line I support Israel because its the RIGHT thing to do (pun intended) And I can't think of one good reason not to.
Isn't that essentially what we did with Pancho Villa?
FIRST, require all laws that apply to the rest of the country also apply equally to the Congress;
SECOND, select a major, independent auditing firm to conduct a comprehensive audit of Congress for waste, fraud or abuse;
THIRD, cut the number of House committees, and cut committee staff by one-third;
FOURTH, limit the terms of all committee chairs; FIFTH, ban the casting of proxy votes in committee;
SIXTH, require committee meetings to be open to the public;
SEVENTH, require a three-fifths majority vote to pass a tax increase;
EIGHTH, guarantee an honest accounting of our Federal Budget by implementing zero base-line budgeting. Thereafter, within the first 100 days of the 104th Congress, we shall bring to the House Floor the following bills, each to be given full and open debate, each to be given a clear and fair vote and each to be immediately available this day for public inspection and scrutiny.
1. THE FISCAL RESPONSIBILITY ACT: A balanced budget/tax limitation amendment and a legislative line-item veto to restore fiscal responsibility to an out- of-control Congress, requiring them to live under the same budget constraints as families and businesses.
2. THE TAKING BACK OUR STREETS ACT: An anti-crime package including stronger truth-in- sentencing, "good faith" exclusionary rule exemptions, effective death penalty provisions, and cuts in social spending from this summer's "crime" bill to fund prison construction and additional law enforcement to keep people secure in their neighborhoods and kids safe in their schools. (
3. THE PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY ACT: Discourage illegitimacy and teen pregnancy by prohibiting welfare to minor mothers and denying increased AFDC for additional children while on welfare, cut spending for welfare programs, and enact a tough two-years-and-out provision with work requirements to promote individual responsibility.
4. THE FAMILY REINFORCEMENT ACT: Child support enforcement, tax incentives for adoption, strengthening rights of parents in their children's education, stronger child pornography laws, and an elderly dependent care tax credit to reinforce the central role of families in American society.
5. THE AMERICAN DREAM RESTORATION ACT: A S500 per child tax credit, begin repeal of the marriage tax penalty, and creation of American Dream Savings Accounts to provide middle class tax relief.
6. THE NATIONAL SECURITY RESTORATION ACT: No U.S. troops under U.N. command and restoration of the essential parts of our national security funding to strengthen our national defense and maintain our credibility around the world.
7. THE SENIOR CITIZENS FAIRNESS ACT: Raise the Social Security earnings limit which currently forces seniors out of the work force, repeal the 1993 tax hikes on Social Security benefits and provide tax incentives for private long-term care insurance to let Older Americans keep more of what they have earned over the years.
8. THE JOB CREATION AND WAGE ENHANCEMENT ACT: Small business incentives, capital gains cut and indexation, neutral cost recovery, risk assessment/cost-benefit analysis, strengthening the Regulatory Flexibility Act and unfunded mandate reform to create jobs and raise worker wages.
9. THE COMMON SENSE LEGAL REFORM ACT: "Loser pays" laws, reasonable limits on punitive damages and reform of product liability laws to stem the endless tide of litigation.
10. THE CITIZEN LEGISLATURE ACT: A first-ever vote on term limits to replace career politicians with citizen legislators.
2, 3, all but the last bit of 4, the first portion of 5, 6 (except maybe the UN bit), and 9 are central tenants of the Neocon world view.
The first section dealing with the sleeze in congress (except the two thirds vote thing which neocons would be divided on), is not particularly ideological.
The "Right" is such a broad description that it's often hard to tell what it really means. I presume from your screen name, however, that you are a proponent of individual lliberty, which opposes you to the Left.
Speaking for myself, if being a mortal enemy of socialism and the Left places me on the Right, then I am proud to be there.
IC. Why have them at all then?
Except from those so far to the Right that they actually lapse over to the far-Left (at least on this issue).
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