Well Purim's over, I guess that means it's back to reality. Although in the Middle East, it's more like sur-reality...
Shmuel Rosner over at the Jerusalem Post has an interesting take on a recent Gallup survey about Israel:
Support for Israel among Americans is at a 19-year high, a February Gallup survey of American attitudes toward international affairs has found.
That's good...
The percent favoring Israel is the highest since 1991, when 64% said they supported Israel shortly after it was hit by Iraqi Scud missiles during the Gulf War.
Also good...
Well - not all Americans. While the upward trend is likely to encourage Israelis, there are also more worrisome signs in this poll. Republicans become more supportive of Israel, but with Democrats the picture is less rosy.
Uh oh...
the gap between Republican and Democratic support is higher than ever (37%!)
That's not good...
Two years ago, I wrote about another poll in which the difference was "significant": it was a mare 20%.
I wrote about this a few years ago too...when I did an overview of which party is favored by more anti-Israel groups. Guess who "won" that contest? I'll give you a hint, it wasn't the Republicans.
But back to Rosner. He gives us this chart breakdown (compiled by the same Gallup poll) by party of what countries they support:
Ok...so if I'm reading this right, Democrats as a whole support the following countries more than Israel:
France
Egypt
Russia
India
Mexico
Let's say France fine, Mexico, fine...after all who doesn't love croissants and drunken Spring Breaks, right? Ignoring for a minute my criticisms of those two countries...India, Russia and EGYPT are all more favored by Democrats than Israel.
This is the same Egypt, by the way that not even a year ago slaughtered 300,000 pigs in order to combat H1N1 flu, which at the time was still being referred to as "swine" flu. It's the same Egypt that puts its own citizens in jail when the government doesn't like what they say. The same Egypt that regularly jails the opposition every time another rigged, mockery of an election is about to take place. The same site of sectarian violence and discrimination against the native non-Muslim, Coptic Egyptians. And this is without even mentioning their treatment of Jews and Palestinians over the years. Ok, good call Democrats.
Next up, Russia.
You may remember a little issue between Russia and their neighbor Georgia from 2008 that left a few thousand people killed or injured and a hundred thousand or so people displaced in just over a week. Or maybe the First Chechen War that resulted in tens of thousands of dead and hundreds of thousands of displaced civilians. Not enough? How about the Second Chechen War (still unresolved by the way) instead? And I'm sure you already know about President/Prime Minister-for-life Putin's Stalin-emulating purges and ownership of the media, right? By the way, take a look at this before and after picture of Grozny from the FIRST Chechnya war. And by the way, the only country to offer any tangible aid to Georgia in defending itself from Russia was...you guessed it, Israel. Great job Russians. Great job Democrats.
"Oh, but Mr. Mossad," you'll cry out, "it's not the same because none of these countries are SUPPOSED to be liberal democracies like Israel is. It's not their FAULT, they just don't know any better!"
As absurd as that pathetic, apologist line of thinking is, it falls apart completely when you look at India.
Now me personally, I have a lot of respect for India. Located in a part of the world only slightly more stable than the Middle East...India is surrounded by hostile, autocratic neighbors - much in the way Israel is. India also has a very serious Islamic extremism issue, much in the way that Israel does. India has the added problems of a massive population and poverty that most Westerners just cannot even comprehend.
But let's be fair...Indians have killed more Muslims over their own version of the West Bank and Gaza in the 63 years since it became free of British rule than Israel will in 63 THOUSAND years. In fact, an overall estimate of over 500,000 killed and 14 million evicted is attributed to just the two year time-period when Pakistan was carved out of western India.
Still better than Israel, though...right Democrats? It's hardly surprising though since all the politically-correct appeasement talk has been coming out of the Left for years. What SHOULD be surprising (but unfortunately is not) is that this utter hypocrisy isn't recognized by Jews for what it is.
I swear, sometimes I feel like Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest...
...trying to get a bunch of lunatics to agree to watching the World Series on TV.
It can't just be me though, right? There have to be other people who realize how insane this all is. How is it, that not only don't Jews question these disturbing trends - they actually EMBRACE them and try to act as if it's all part of being pro-Israel in some very cleverly intellectual way that us knuckle-dragging "neo-cons" just would never understand.
And then just to add insult to insanity we end off with this:
Americans are no more optimistic today than they were last year that peace can be reached between Israel and the Palestinians -- and they are, in fact, less optimistic than they were toward the end of the Bush administration.
There's your hope and change nonsense. Is it time to start admitting that maybe just voting the party line in the last election wasn't the best thing for Israel and Jews? Or are we, as Jews, finally ready to admit that we have a highly disturbing 2,000 year old tendency to act against our interests? It's one or the other. It can't be both, it can't be neither.
You'd have to be CRAZY to think otherwise. Right?
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10 comments:
After I posted this I noticed that Rosner's math was wrong on the gap between Republicans and Democrats... 80% - 53% = 27% differential, not 37%. Since it's a direct quote I'm not going to alter it from the way it was written unless it's corrected on his site too...
I did a walk around poll, asking if people I work with favor Israel. I got a resounding yes. I then asked if they favored France, Egypt, Russia, India or Mexico more or less then they favored Israel. Egypt and Russia didn't fare all that well. France, India, and Mexico were favored much more than Israel so I asked why. Interesting reply was "we give Israel a lot of money and our friendship with them hurts us." I asked if they would want the relationship changed. 100% resounding no. I see a lot of conflicting answers in my casual poll. My point is this, people may not like Israel best in a popularity contest but they seem willing to support Israel and our friendship with Israel even though it is not an easy friendship. I did not bother to do my poll along party lines because of the mood in the country. Do we really want the question of Israel to be decided by two groups who hate each other and have no intention of getting along. People on both sides of the aisle support Israel. One problem I see is people on the Left do not like conflict. Israel discussion usually involve conflict. Could have something to do with sentiments. Or maybe not.
My other point is - this discussion trying to further distance the two political parties in this country along the Israel issue is more hurtful than it is helpful. You need to accept Israel supporters wherever you find them. Don't make it a wedge issue.
Democrats like gay marriage, but when Egyptian government kills the gay, you don't here a democrat shouting out. Democrats are equivalent to hypocrites.
Just dropping in, I'm a Republican and support Israel. It's interesting to me, not that long ago I remember Abraham Foxman was going nuts about how Bush is encouraging Antisemitism. But this manufactured, totally pointless, crisis between Obama and Israel has fomented an unbelievable amount. Just glance at the comments section on Huffington Post, or many diaries at Daily KOS. You regularly see old myths like "Jews in the Obama administration have dual loyalty" or "the Jewish lobby controls our government."
The linkages that the Obama administration draws between Israel and different international problems are absurd. As if Al Qaeda would stop wanting to kill us, if only the Jews would just stop building stuff in the west bank. They're not angry because of an apartment block in Jerusalem, they're angry that we support Israel at all, they're angry Israel exists.
Dressing down Israel doesn't help us with Iran or even Hamas. In fact, it makes Palestinians even more intransigent since agreeing to a peace plan would only help to patch the Israel-US relationship again. So long as Obama depicts Israel as the problem, Hamas is going to do anything it can to avoid peace.
By the way, I'm also amazed at how effectively Jewish Democrats play off the fear of the Evangelicals. They act like Republican support for Israel is purely born out of rapture beliefs, it's such a farce, not nearly enough people fit into the "rapture-ready" camp to explain Republican support. For the real reason, just look at how right vs left media depicted Caste Lead. Right wing media like fox gave real reporting on the years of missile launches Israel suffered, and the real mental effects on children. Left wing media like Huffington Post depicted Israel as just one day, for no particular reason, deciding to terror bomb civilians in Gaza.
By the way, I'm an agnostic, so I don't support Israel because of Rapture beliefs or anything of the sort. I support Israel because it's the morally right thing to do. You support the good guy, and anyone with half a brain can pick the good guy out here. It's funny that for all their talk about morality guiding our foreign policy, it's the liberals who suggest we throw Israel or Taiwan under the bus.
Seriously, if we're just going to be expedient, why stop with Israel? Let's dump Taiwan overboard as well. Red China has a lot more to offer then tiny Taiwan, our alliance with them is dumb on it's face from a utilitarian perspective. I'm sure the Chinese would be willing to re-evaluate their currency and help out with N.Korea in exchange for being unified. And then we could pass a resolution in the security council declaring Tibet the eternal property of China in exchange for the Chinese settling their Kashmir dispute. *sigh*
Great post Verizon...
To take it even further...if Palestinian suffering is so terribly offensive to Americans who claim they're "liberals" - what are they doing to protest the horrendous suffering of the Congolese and Darfurians? Not to mention the Tibetans? How about the innocent Iranians trapped beneath the heels of the ayatollahs? Why specifically target Israel...a country that is even more liberal than the United States...instead of going after the decidedly UNLIBERAL regimes that surround it, who by the way - Israel fights everyday.
How can they support movements that outlaw their own rights and basically everything they stand for? It's completely insane and it needs to be pointed out every time.
Exactly. Now that I think about it, you're right, liberals already do for the most part put morality backseat in diplomacy. The one place they really choose to exercise moral outrage, Palestine, they are either so confused or dishonest that they've got morality and immorality ass-backwards. That partly stems from a fundamentally Marxist worldview... the economically well off must be the bad guys. Israel is wealthy, Palestine is poor, ergo Israel is evil.
And if these liberals are so concerned for the "Palestinian" refugees of 1947, how about we give equal consideration to the Jewish refugees of the 1950s? It's funny, I've never heard a single liberal call for Muslim countries to offer Jews a right of return, or even compensate for land stolen from them. So:
Arabs steal land from Jews = OK.
Jews buy land from Arabs = BAD
Once the Arabs pay, lets say, 50 billion dollars to Israel as compensation for the theft of Jewish property after WW2, then I'd say we're approaching something of a moral equivalence (since the Jews actually purchased property in Israel).
Also, great blog. There is a tide of ignorance against Israel. Also a sort of extreme post modernist morality which claims "we really can't judge another culture's practices as negative, because that would be prejudicial" - something along those lines. Both are best stopped now rather than later.
I can sympathize with your feeling of living in One Flew over the Cuckoos Nest, I grew up in Boston! :)
Where is this "Palestine" of which you speak? Is it somewhere near Middle Earth or Never Never Land? lol
But in all seriousness...I've actually hit on many of the topics you've brought up in the past:
On the looters consumer sucking the producers dry:
The Sanction of the Victim and the Guiltiest Man in the Room
On the forgotten Jewish refugees from Arab lands:
Catastrophe
On the fake moral outrage about Palestinians while maintaining silence on the REAL disasters:
Does Not Compute
It's really an insane world we live in my friend. Very very difficult to keep your head straight sometimes. Let me know if you're interested in getting on my mailing list...I usually update this place once a week or so, although lately there's just been too much going on to ignore. Send me your email address to ronmossad at g mail dot com.
I hope you don't mind by the way but in my non-political life I'm a die-hard Yankee fan.
Ah, another Yankees fan, like Schilling!
I've since moved to St.Louis, there are still many memories of the Red Sox looking like they're doing well up until ~7th inning (excitement grows, we might beat em this time!)... and then the Yankees mercilessly whopping them (my spirit is crushed, but at least I can sneak down to the now open luxury seats behind home plate).
I added myself to your mailing list, I only subscribe to bloggers who infrequently and inconsistently update. It means they've got insightful and well thought out stuff (and not daily updates about Obama's dog).
If I could express to you the amount of disdain I have for Curt Schilling...I mean...I could run an entire additional blog about my hatred for the Red Sox and Schilling. Ironically, I'll probably be encouraging people to vote for him whenever he runs for office, but so it goes in the insane world we were born into.
As for updates - lately I've been making pretty regular updates just about every other day - but I can't keep this pace up for long...it's exhausting.
Like you said, I'm not just writing about Obama's dog...most of my blogs turn into epic rants complete with pictures and videos...often taking upwards of 5 hours to do so I can't comment on every little thing that happens. Although sometimes I'd like to...
Usually I'll put up a blog once or twice a week. In any case, I'm looking forward to reading more of your insightful comments in the future!
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