In January a Ha'aretz panel of political experts ranked the various Presidential candidates based on their support for strong US-Israeli ties and their opposition to Iran. Of the candidates who made it to 2008, Barack Obama was dead last. After Obama, the next worst candidate was Joe Biden. So I'm less than surprised that the Obama/Biden ticket got this speech shut down:
"...Ahmadinejad may choose his words carefully, but underneath all of the rhetoric is an agenda that threatens all who seek a safer and freer world. We gather here today to highlight the Iranian dictator's intentions and to call for action to thwart him.
He must be stopped.
The world must awake to the threat this man poses to all of us. Ahmadinejad denies that the Holocaust ever took place.
He dreams of being an agent in a "Final Solution" - the elimination of the Jewish people. He has called Israel a "stinking corpse" that is "on its way to annihilation." Such talk cannot be dismissed as the ravings of a madman - not when Iran just this summer tested long-range Shahab-3 missiles capable of striking Tel Aviv, not when the Iranian nuclear program is nearing completion, and not when Iran sponsors terrorists that threaten and kill innocent people around the world..."
The awesomeness of the speech might make you forget the sheer mendacity involved in not letting Palin deliver it. I thought that liberal Jewish organizations had pretty much maxed out on insufferable absurdity when they reacted to the RJC's demonstrably accurate polling questions. But the NJDC's role in killing this speech and elevating Ahmadinejad - along with other liberal Jewish organizations like JStreet - set new standards for shameless, unblinking hypocrisy:
Monday’s protest against Ahmadinejad is too important to be tainted by partisanship. Unfortunately, the campaign of Senator John McCain is much more interested in scoring political points than insuring there is bipartisan solidarity around the anti- Ahmadinejad efforts. Therefore, we call upon the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations to withdraw the invitation to Governor Sarah Palin and we applaud Senator Hillary Clinton’s decision to not attend the rally after the attendance of Palin was announced.
The Obama campaign forces Democrats to withdraw from a non-partisan event. Then they attack the McCain campaign - along with the bulk of America's Jewish organizations - for playing partisan politics on Iran. Then they get self-righteous about it. Surreal. Just mind numbingly surreal.
You know what would be much easier than having to suffer through this? Easier than having to listen to these jagoffs make the dumbest arguments imaginable? It would be easier if liberal Jews would just admit that they're not that worried about political Islam and that they're not really concerned about Israel. It's not like this is some huge secret. The polling on this question has been conclusive for years. Both in absolute terms and relative to other groups like Christian evangelicals, liberal Jews just aren't that concerned about Israeli security.
More broadly, their foreign policy inclinations are to minimize the spread of political Islam while emphasizing "root cause" and "cycle of violence" arguments. It's not for nothing that political watchers openly mocked John Edwards for trying to get the NJDC enthusiastic about defending Israel. Yeah there are six million Israeli Jews being targeted for genocide. And yeah they kind of care. But it's just not a priority for them.
But Democrats can't just admit that their foreign policy gets cashed out as "it's all Israel's fault." They'd lose. So instead liberal Jewish groups unblinkingly offer smear after smear and aggressively stupid argument after aggressively stupid argument. After the jump, a catalogue of some of their most blatant fabrications and their most vicious smears - predictably issued about Obama's most obviously anti-Semitic supporters and stridently anti-Israel statements.
It was inevitable that liberal Jewish groups would end up gravitating toward Walt and Mearsheimer. They might not agree with Walt and Mearsheimer that the US-Israel alliance caused 9/11 - but they're fellow travelers striding down the same road. That's why they remain unflustered when anti-Semitic rants about "the Jewish Lobby" and the Israeli connection to 9/11 repeatedly pop up on Obama sites. It's why they won't abandon a party that's stacked with politicians who think rich Jews manipulated the US into the Iraq war. It's why they created J-Street in the first place to fight against the dominance of AIPAC. All of these attacks and smears: literally out of the Walt and Mearsheimer playbook.
While the GOP base supports Israel, the Democratic base is less enthusiastic and has a relatively soft spot for the Islamic Republic. That's why McCain blasts Jimmy Carter for legitimizing Hamas but Obama and Clinton are "clearly uncomfortable" leveling any criticism. It's why Obama and John Edwards talk as if the problem with Iranian nuclearization is that the skittish Israelis might overreact and do something stupid.
But again, the American people overwhelmingly support Israel. So instead of just saying "we oppose Palin because of her relative support for the US-Israeli alliance", liberal Jewish groups call her a Nazi. Instead of admitting that the GOP base is enthusiastically pro-Israel, they accuse Christian Zionists of trying to usher in the apocalypse.
Nor can liberal Jewish groups trot out "we support the Obama campaign because of its relative opposition to the US-Israel alliance." Instead, pro-Obama shills like Bob Wexler have to spend their time misleading people about Obama's anti-Israel foreign policy team: both about the anti-Israel experts who advise Obama and about the pro-Israel Obama advisers who don't actually exist. They unblinklinkgly deny that Obama harbors anti-Israel inclinations and baldly lie about Biden's anti-Israel history. And Obama's well documented, repeatedly proclaimed promise to meet with Iranian leaders "without preconditions"? Never happened.
Of course the Obama White House will degrade US-Israeli ties. That's what his foreign policy team thinks needs to be done to promote American interests. It will be a White House that changes US priorities. It will be friendlier with Hamas and friendlier with Syria and friendlier with radical Muslim countries and friendlier with Hezbollah - all at the expense of Israel. Following the personal declarations of Obama, it will obviously be friendlier with Iran. And it will be an administration institutionally predisposed to blame Israel for Middle East instability across the board.
Of course that's how it will play out. That's what distinguishes liberal foreign policy from conservative foreign policy. Those are the policeis that Obama is running on. Those are the policies that his advisers discuss at length in their academic work. But to listen to liberal Jewish groups, Bush is a better friend to Iran than Obama and Biden is a bigger supporter of Israel than Palin.
It's kind appropriate that the Orwellian doublethink of left-leaning Jews would get matched by the Orwellian newspeak of liberal Jewish organizations. Still - there's something to be said for not flat out lying, isn't there? It's not just that ostensibly pro-Israel Jews are about to usher in the most anti-Israel administration ever. It's how insufferable they're going to be when what's obvious to everybody else becomes undeniable to them. There will come a day circa 2010 when Israel has to defend itself against Iran. The Obama administration will side with international efforts to condemn the Jewish State. And then Democratic Jews will act surprised. And you have to admit that that - in addition to the whole Middle East nuclear war thing - is going to be pretty fucking obnoxious.