JustASC

Speaking to the Knesset, President Bush suggested that Obama and Democrats (who else could he have meant?) favor a policy of appeasement toward terrorists.

Obama fired back, accusing Bush of using the “60th anniversary of Israel’s independence to launch a false political attack.”

Joe Lieberman then issued a statement agreeing with Bush:

President Bush got it exactly right today when he warned about the threat of Iran and its terrorist proxies like Hamas and Hezbollah. It is imperative that we reject the flawed and naïve thinking that denies or dismisses the words of extremists and terrorists when they shout “Death to America” and “Death to Israel,” and that holds that - if only we were to sit down and negotiate with these killers - they would cease to threaten us. It is critical to our national security that our commander-in-chief is able to distinguish between America’s friends and America’s enemies, and not confuse the two.

So if one is to follow the line of reasoning that “tough, direct presidential diplomacy with Iran without preconditions,” as Obama calls for, are exactly analogous with “appeasement,” what’s the corollary of Lieberman’s remarks? What’s the alternative policy Lieberman is promoting? If talks=appeasement, then is it fair to say that no talks=war? (That is, after all, how we handled Hitler.)

Is Lieberman calling for war on Iran? Is that what McCain stands for? Is he prepared to say so? And will the Jews who join in tagging Obama a latter-day Chamberlain settle for nothing less?

Syndicated columnist Susan Estrich raises an interesting point about a series of YouTube videos in which amateurs subtitle a clip from a Hitler biopic to make the Fuerher rant about the topic du jour: the Dallas Cowboys’ playoff loss, being kicked off of Microsoft Live, losing his Xbox account, etc. In the most recent incarnation, Hitler is Hillary Clinton, ranting against Obama’s primary lead.

Writes Estrich:

There is, obviously, something very troubling about this very popular series. Hitler is not funny. Killing six million Jews is no joke.
Waging war across Europe, slaughtering millions of people because of their religion, or because they were gypsies or gay, is just not humorous. Sixty years, almost to the day, from the founding of Israel out of the ashes of the Holocaust, can it be that putting words to the rant of the most evil man of our time is the key to Internet fame, if not fortune?

The thing is, it IS funny when the 20th century’s signature madman is shown raving about having wasted his money on a Terrell Owens jersey. The video doesn’t mock anybody but Hitler, over-the-top television actors, and Dallas Cowboy fans — and the sputtering rage they felt when their team botched yet another shot at the Superbowl. (As one fan comments on the video at YouTube: “This is AWESOME! It explains *exactly* what it it was like to be a Cowboy fan and lose this season. “)

The joke wears off in the Hillary version, however. It’s goofily absurdist to imagine Hitler as a Cowboys or X-Box fan. But it’s a low blow to compare Clinton, or any politican really, to Hitler.

Mel Brooks and Charlie Chaplin showed you can deflate Hitler and his myth through parody. But the lesson of these “downfall” videos: Pick your targets carefully.

I’d like to think my Obama-Kishkes meme, first raised in this column, has gained some currency.

On Feb. 28, I wrote:

…[T]here is an intangible reason why Obama worries the pro-Israel camp. Call it the Kishkes Factor.

Maybe they’ve grown spoiled, but you hear in the pro-Israel, anti-Obama rhetoric the notion that Obama’s spotless Senate voting record on Israel and meat-and-potatoes speeches to AIPAC are not quite enough. “Window dressing,” as someone dismissively described it to me. A certain kind of pro-Israel voter wants to know that candidates feel for Israel in their guts - their kishkes - and not just in their heads.

Yesterday, in his Q and A with Obama, the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg writes:

The Hamas episode won’t help Obama’s attempts to win over Jewish voters, particularly those in such places as — to pull an example from the air — Palm Beach County, Florida, whose Jewish residents tend to appreciate robust American support for Israel, and worry about whether presidential candidates feel the importance of Israel in their kishkes, or guts.

Then Goldberg puts the question to the candidate:

JG: Go to the kishke question, the gut question: the idea that if Jews know that you love them, then you can say whatever you want about Israel, but if we don’t know you — Jim Baker, Zbigniew Brzezinski — then everything is suspect. There seems to be in some quarters, in Florida and other places, a sense that you don’t feel Jewish worry the way a senator from New York would feel it.

Obama’s answer after the jump: (more…)

From NJJN’s Israel anniversary supplement:

My family and I were living in Israel in 1998, when the country celebrated its 50th anniversary of independence.

That same year, Israel had an entry in the Eurovision Song Contest, a wildly popular television pageant that combines elements of the Olympics and American Idol. Israel’s official entry was sung by a performer named Dana International, a sultry Cher look-alike with an interesting back story: Ms. International was a transsexual who underwent gender reassignment surgery in 1993.

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New Voices, the indispensable Jewish students magazine, is out with a new issue, featuring a fascinating report on the the University of California at Irvine, and a divide between campus Jewish activists and outside Jewish groups over the extent of anti-Semitism at the 25,000-strong state institution. Some student leaders say the problem is being exaggerated, or is at least no worse than at other state universities. The ZOA begs to differ, of course, and may have cost one student leader a leadership role.

Daniel Schroeter, a professor of Jewish Studies, has a key quote:  

“I think part of the reason it’s such an issue is the outside organizations, on both sides, reaching in and making it one. A whole lot of allegations get blown out of proportion.”

Writing in Slate about the new dovish and self-described “pro-Israel” lobbying group J Street, Shmuel Rosner says it’s time to dump the term “pro-Israel”:

Defining someone as “pro-Israel”- or, for that matter, pro-anything or anti-anything - is a way for people to simplify complicated questions when searching for a political party, a candidate, or an organization they would like to support. The problem is that along the way the term has been used so often - to describe so many conflicting positions - that it has become practically meaningless, more confusing than clarifying.

So maybe now, for Israel’s 60th birthday, there’s one last position that the “pro-Israel” camp can agree on: It is time to dump the term. Those Democrats might be right when they tell William Daroff: “We are all pro-Israel.” But Republicans are also right when they insist: “We should still talk about the specifics.” Without specifics, being “pro-Israel” is almost like being pro-great-weather or pro-tasty-food.

Rosner misses something here: J Street needs to call itself “pro-Israel” because so many of its opponents will question not its policies, but its very commitment to the security and future of a Jewish state. J Street probably welcomes a debate on “specifics” ; but they know that too often you can’t have that debate with any intelligence because the right will cry “anti-Israel” if you cross any of the lines they have drawn in the sand.

“Pro-Israel” is the rhetorical version of the flag pin: You don’t need to wear one to be patriotic; but if you don’t wear it, you can bet your opponents will point it out.

And there is a difference between a left wing position that would like to see U.S. pressure on Israel to make  a deal with the Palestinians, and a left-wing position that propsoes a “single-state” soultion for Israel and Palestine. The former stands for a Jewish democratic state; the latter does not. “Pro-Israel” establishes a baseline, which J Street states nicely when it talks about being committed to “U.S. support for Israel as a Jewish and democratic state [as] an historic and legitimate commitment” and “maintaining Israel’s qualitative military edge.”

This has got to be the stupidest attack on Obama yet, and that’s saying something.

According to Newsmax, Reverend Otis Moss, Jeremiah Wright’s successor at Trinity United is “Just As Controversial” because he states in a sermon that:

 Noah was a “thug” who “was drinking much gin and juice and got drunk on the eve of reconstruction.”

Abraham “pimped his own wife.”

Jacob was a “hustler” who “stole his own brother’s birthright.”

Moses was a “thug” and “if he got mad would give you a royal beatdown.”

Sampson was a “thug” and a “player.”

David was a “thug,” a “shot caller,” and a “player,” and a man after God’s own heart.

A 12-year-old exegete would quickly figure out that “thug” is, in this context, a synonym for “sinner” — and that the entire sermon, like so many in Christian tradition (let alone in mussar), is about the redemption of sinners.

But never mind — let’s review the biblical record:

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A perhaps surprisingly nuanced Yom Haatzmaut essay in today’s Wall Street Journal, via University of Richmond law prof (and sabra) Shari Motro. Writing about her plans to return to her native land on sabbatical after many years in America, she writes of Israel:

I come from a place - from streets I remember when they were still unpaved, from the house where I lost my first tooth, from the beachside terrace where my grandmother taught me how to tell time, from the cemetery where we buried her.

I didn’t choose these places, and I didn’t expel anybody. But that doesn’t change the fact that my joy is someone else’s pain. My home is someone else’s home, a home they can’t return to, because of me. I can’t reconcile this, but running from it doesn’t reconcile it either.

I put her essay in the a category of Israel writing I’ll call Zionist Realism. It is both fully supportive of the Jewish state and honest about its challenges, and yes, failings. It chooses neither to mythologize nor demonize Zionism, nor dismiss its vailidity on the basis of its unmet challenges and moral flaws. Other examples include David Remnick’s recent review of Benny Morris’s book, 1948, and Jeffrey Goldberg’s recent cover story for the Atlantic.

Tom Segev uses “Zionist Realism” to refer to a mindset that he says many Israelis abandoned after 1967. Such realism “advocated settlement,” but

it had always done so with one major caveat: capturing more territory would mean serious demographic dangers. Accordingly, the movement had adopted a basic strategy known as “maximum land, minimum Arabs,” and most of its thinkers had favored maintaining a solid Jewish majority in Jewish-controlled land over ruling vast areas populated by Arabs.

Zionist Realists “struggled with the questions of where to draw the line and… how much new land can be settled without endangering Israel’s Jewish and democratic character.”

Zionist Realism describes a place where I find myself, in between the Propagandists, for whom pro-Israel equals an inability to acknowledge Israel’s flaws, and the Furies,  who treat the Jewish presence in Palestine as a regrettable, even criminal, mistake of the 20th century.

A.P.’s obit for Irvine Robbins, the Robbins in Baskin-Robbins, has this fun tidbit: 

Robbins opened his first ice cream store in Glendale, Calif., in December 1945, following his discharge from the Army. He used $6,000 from a cashed-in insurance policy his father had given him for his bar mitzvah.

Wall Street Journal reporter Sarmad Ali blogs about his experiences with Jews in the United States and his native Baghdad. Interesting aside about irreverence among Jews (lots) and Muslims (not so much):

A few weeks ago, I flew to Michigan to join my close friend’s family in celebrating the Jewish holiday of Passover. It was my second time going to a Seder and it again stirred memories of how Jews were regarded in Iraq in my childhood.

The first night we had a fairly big table with a dozen people or more. My friend’s grandfather sat at the head of the table and led the readings, asking others, including me, to recite some passages from a Passover booklet. When a reference to the Euphrates River came up, I leaned over to point it out to my friend. “These are my people,” I whispered, chuckling. The reading was punctuated with jokes and questions as we went around the table telling the story of how the Jews were slaves and then left Egypt. I found that part interesting.

 In Islam, it’s very unlikely for people to joke during religious ceremonies and readings. It’s considered inappropriate and forbidden. When I first came to the U.S., I heard many people, some even observant, making jokes about religious figures like Moses and Jesus. I found it at the time very inappropriate and offensive, and I remember asking them how they could speak so lightly of these “guys,” whom we Muslims revere and refer to as prophets of Allah.