2005-05-26

The Jewish agenda

2015-02-18-Harold-Meyerson-netanyahus-curious-gop-connection
Netanyahu’s curious GOP connection
By Harold Meyerson
Washington Post, 2015-02-18

...

Of all the reasons
that American Jews remain firmly Democratic, and liberal as well,
the most fundamental is

their commitment, both particular and universal,
to minority rights.

For Jews in a majority-Christian country,
the enshrinement of minority rights and its institutional guarantees —
nondiscrimination in hiring and voting, say,
or a judiciary independent of the elected branches of government —
has always been paramount.
It’s why American Jews have embraced
not only the battles for their own liberties
but those of every other minority group.

Consider, for instance,
the way most American Jews look at the two parties’ stances in recent decades
on immigration and immigrants’ rights.
As far back as 1994,
when California voters approved a ballot measure, Proposition 187,
that would have denied virtually all public services —
including the right to attend K-12 schools —
to undocumented immigrants,
the state’s most heavily Jewish neighborhoods, including West Los Angeles,
voted overwhelmingly against it.
(The measure was subsequently struck down by the courts.)
[Which surely had nothing whatsoever to do with Jewish opposition to it.
Right.]

Today, with Republicans bent on denying legal status to
undocumented immigrants who’ve been here for decades,
or who were brought here as children,
or who came here fleeing horrific violence in their Central American homelands,
many Jews respond not just with sympathy but with empathy:
Their grandparents or great-grandparents once came here, too,
and many of them were fleeing the kind of violence
that propelled more recent immigrants to cross the Rio Grande.
Some of their grandparents also tried to come here after Hitler’s rise to power,
but our restrictive post-1924 immigration laws blocked their escape.

Some American Jews, to be sure, support the Republicans,
but for most, to back a party so hostile to minority and immigrant rights
is all but unnatural.
It’s not in their DNA.


This egalitarianism also informs many American Jews’, and American Zionists’,
support for a two-state solution
establishing a Palestinian state that abuts Israel.

When American Jews — or anyone with eyes to see —
look at Netanyahu and the Israeli right,
they don’t see a leader or movement with any such interest in a two-state solution
or the minority rights that have been so fundamental to Jews in the diaspora.
Many Israelis, in contrast to Bibi,
have maintained that more egalitarian perspective
despite living in a state where they constitute the majority.
Many have not; the upcoming Israeli elections will at least partly measure the strengths of these two camps.

For now, Israel’s prime minister is aligning himself with one of America’s two camps.
It’s not the camp that commands — or even can command — the support of most American Jews.
That will pose a problem for Israel.

[So Meyerson is evidently asserting that
America's consistent support for Israel
is not caused, in a very critical way,
by American Jews.
If that is what Meyerson believes, I take strong exception.

I believe that, if it were not for the media affecting how Americans see issues,
that our policy towards Israel and the Middle East
would have remained that adopted by Dwight D. Eisenhower in his 1950s presidency,
in particular his pressure on Israel in 1956 to roll back their Sinai invasion,
and that advocated even earlier by George C. Marshall.
The media is shaping American opinion (they admit that),
and the reason for their evident bias is Jewish control.]








2017

2017-04-22-Gottfried-eastern-european-jews-and-the-case-of-the-marginalized-elite
Eastern European Jews and the Case of the Marginalized Elite
by Paul Gottfried
Unz Review, 2017-04-22

...
The more dramatically Eastern European Jews progress socio-economically,
the more strenuously they identify with “marginalized groups”
and seek to undermine the white Christian majority population.
And though he takes care to guard against charges of being Politically Incorrect,
David R. Verbeeten’s The Politics of Non-Assimilation:
Three Generations of Eastern European Jews in the United States in the Twentieth Century

(De Kalb: NIU Press, 2017)
is a goldmine of sociological evidence revealing this critically important phenomenon
which so many scholars are happy to ignore.

...

Labels: ,