Posted on 07/04/2009 5:23:43 PM PDT by Ooh-Ah
The American lawyer Alan Dershowitz is one of the most prolific, high-profile and indefatiguable defenders of Israel and the Jewish people against the tidal wave of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish feeling currently coursing through the west. So a piece by him in the Wall Street Journal giving expression to the rising anxiety being felt about Obama by American Jews naturally arouses great interest.
But just like the majority of American Jews, getting on for 80 per cent of whom voted for Obama, he is a Democrat supporter who is incapable of acknowledging the truth about this President. For most American Jews, the horror of even entertaining the hypothetical possibility that they might ever in a million years have to vote for a Republican is so great they simply cannot see what is staring them in the face -- that this Democratic President is lethal for both Israel and the free world. And in this article Dershowitz shows that he too is just as blind.
Acknowledging the anxiety among some American Jews about Obama’s attitude to Israel, Dershowitz concludes uneasily that there isn’t really a problem here because all Obama is doing is putting pressure on Israel over the settlements, which most American Jews don’t support anyway. But this is totally to miss the point. The pressure over the settlements per se is not the reason for the intense concern.
It is instead, first and foremost, the fact that Obama is treating Israel as if it is the obstacle to peace in the Middle East. Obama thus inverts aggressor and victim, denying Israel’s six-decade long victimisation and airbrushing out Arab aggression. The question remains: why has Obama chosen to pick a fight with Israel while soft-soaping Iran which is threatening it with genocide? The answer is obvious: Israel is to be used to buy off Iran just as Czechoslovakia was used at Munich. Indeed, I would say this is worse even than that, since I suspect that Obama – coming as he does from a radical leftist milieu, with vicious Israel-haters amongst his closest friends -- would be doing this to Israel even if Iran was not the problem that it is.
In any event, the double standard is egregious. Obama has torn up his previous understandings with Israel over the settlements while putting no pressure at all on the Palestinians, even though since they are the regional aggressor there can be no peace unless they end their aggression and certainly not until they accept Israel as a Jewish state, which they have said explicitly they will never do. On this, Obama is totally silent. So too is Dershowitz. That’s some omission.
Next, Obama is pressuring Israel to set up a Palestine state – within two years this will exist, swaggers Rahm Emanuel. But everyone knows that as soon as Israel leaves the West Bank, Hamas – or even worse – will take over. The only reason the (also appalling) Abbas is still in Ramallah, enabling Obama to pretend there is a Palestinian interlocutor for peace, is because the Israelis are keeping Hamas at bay. Yet Dershowitz writes:
There is no evidence of any weakening of American support for Israel's right to defend its children from the kind of rocket attacks candidate Obama commented on during his visit to Sderot.
So what exactly does he think would happen if Israel came out of the West Bank and the Hamas rockets were down the road from Jerusalem and Tel Aviv (literally: many in the west have absolutely no idea how tiny Israel is). It’s not a question of Israel’s ‘right to defend its children’. If Obama has his way, Israel would not be able to defend its children or anyone else, because Obama would have removed its defences by putting its enemies in charge of them. It is astounding that Dershowitz can’t see this.
Then there was Obama’s appalling Cairo speech -- which I wrote about here – in which he conspicuously refrained from committing himself to defending Zionism and the Jewish people from the attacks and incitement to genocide against them, but committed himself instead to defending their attackers against ‘negative stereotyping’. On this, Dershowitz has nothing to say.
Worse still, by falsely asserting that the Jewish aspiration for Israel derived from the Holocaust, Obama effectively denied that the Jewish people were in Israel as of right and thus endorsed the core element of the Arab and Muslim propaganda of war and extermination. On this, Dershowitz has nothing to say.
Obama drew a vile – and telling – equivalence between the Nazi extermination camps and the Palestinian ‘refugee’ camps. On this, Dershowitz has nothing to say. Obama's statement that the Palestinians ‘have suffered in pursuit of a homeland’ was grossly and historically untrue, and again denied Arab aggression. On this, Dershowitz has nothing to say. Equally vilely, Obama equated genocidal terrorism by the Palestinians with the civil rights movement in America and the resistance against apartheid in South Africa. On all of this, Dershowitz has nothing to say.
Dershowitz also grossly underplays the terrible harm Obama is doing to the security not just of Israel but the world through his reckless appeasement of Iran. In the last few weeks, this has actively undercut the Iranian democrats trying to oust their tyrannical regime, and has actually strengthened that regime. All the evidence suggests ever more strongly that Obama has decided America will ‘live with’ a nuclear Iran, whatever it does to its own people. Which leaves Israel hung out to dry.
But even here, where he is clearly most concerned, Dershowitz scuttles under his comfort blanket – Dennis Ross, who was originally supposed to have been the US special envoy to Iran but was recently announced senior director of the National Security Council and special assistant to the President for the region. It is not at all clear whether this ambiguous development represents a promotion or demotion for Ross. Either way, for Dershowitz to rest his optimism that Obama’s Iran policy will be all right on the night entirely upon the figure of Dennis Ross is pathetic. Ross, a Jew who played Mr Nice to Robert Malley’s Mr Nasty towards Israel in the Camp David debacle under President Clinton, is clearly being used by Obama as a human shield behind which he can bully Israel with impunity. American Jews assume that his proximity to Obama means the President’s intentions towards Israel are benign. Dazzled by this vision of Ross as the guarantor of Obama’s good faith, they thus ignore altogether the terrible import of the actual words coming out of the President’s mouth.
The fact is that many American Jews are so ignorant of the history of the Jewish people, the centrality of Israel in its history and the legality and justice of its position that they probably saw nothing wrong in Obama saying that the Jewish aspiration for Israel came out of the Holocaust because they think this too. Nor do they see the appalling double standard in the bullying of Israel over the settlements and what that tells us about Obama’s attitude towards Israel, because – as Dershowitz himself makes all too plain -- they too think in much the same way, that the settlements are the principal obstacle to peace.
Many if not most American Jews have a highly sentimentalised view of Israel. They never go there, are deeply ignorant of its history and current realities, and are infinitely more concerned with their own view of themselves as social liberals, a view reflected back at themselves through voting for a Democrat President.
Whatever else he is, however, Dershowitz is certainly not ignorant. Which makes this lamentable article all the more revealing, and depressing.
I’ll just say that aborting a child because of the way he was conceived is homicide. Just like every other procured abortion.
I would suggest to you that what needs questioning is the harebrained notion that killing a baby brings healing to anybody, including a women who has been raped or molested.
Rather than caving in to such slovenly thinking, we need to be bringing the truth to more people.
“I would suggest to you that what needs questioning is the harebrained notion that killing a baby brings healing to anybody, including a women who has been raped or molested.”
Are you really a Priest? I wonder about someone that is so judgmental and doesn’t leave anything up to God. Do you feel as strong about the conviction of Priests that molest children by legal authorities or do you believe that it is up to the Church?
Was it murder when the Church made the decision to let a mother die to save the baby? Man is not always smart enough to make the right decision and when you force your will on others it may becomes criminal. There is a very short distance between being a Christian and becoming a member of the Taliban in some instances.
I wonder if I will get a reply.
Here’s a reply.
You say that we ought to let babies be aborted. That’s “leaving things up to God.”
So, according to your principle, no one should have minded what Jack the Ripper was doing. In fact, those people (the London cops) should have “left it up to God.” I.e., let God sort out things AFTER Jack the Ripper did his thing. People were so judgmental about Jack the Ripper—and they didn’t even know him!
You don’t seem to know the meaning of “judgmental.”
I’m “judgmental” if I say “You are going to Hell.”
It’s not “judgmental” to say: “Shoving Jews into ovens is evil.” Or: “Killing babies in the womb is evil.”
It is also NOT judgmental to say: “If you want to go to Hell, killing babies is a good way to make sure you go there.”
“Was it murder when the Church made the decision to let a mother die to save the baby?”
The Church never made any such decision. When did this alleged incident allegedly happen?
You don’t read well. I don’t agree with abortion but I also don’t think that you can oontrol a woman’s body beyond a certain point without becoming as evil as the act your trying to prevent. The issue is when do you let God decide or when do you play God.
Your comparisons are ridiculous.
I think that if I amgoing to hell I will probably find you there who will be first is up to God.
Just a note in case you would like to see my reply to the Priest.
Belfast Times and others.
Declaring that “life must always be protected”, a senior Vatican cleric has defended the Catholic Church’s decision to excommunicate the mother and doctors of a nine-year-old rape victim who had a life-saving abortion in Brazil.
Declaring that “life must always be protected”, a senior Vatican cleric has defended the Catholic Church’s decision to excommunicate the mother and doctors of a nine-year-old rape victim who had a life-saving abortion in Brazil. Belfast Times and others.
It looks like a choice by the Church to me.
Now about my question of molestation.
Here I am accusing on not reading and I didn’t even notice that it was you in the last post. I apologize for my reading comment.
What the Church does is insist that deliberate killing of innocent people is wrong.
What our culture of death claims is that some innocent people may be killed, if doing so produces some result that is desired by other people.
Which proposition do you susscribe to?
What the Church does is insist that deliberate killing of innocent people is wrong.
What our culture of death claims is that some innocent people may be killed, if doing so produces some result that is desired by other people.
What you have conveyed to me is that, using the case of the Brazilian girl, is that the Catholic Church decided that the nine year old girl was less innocent than the fetus. So by your second statement the Catholic Church decided that the death of one innocent was preferable to death of another to obtain the result that some mortal saw as their desired result. As a Baptist I don’t subscribe to the idea that a religious organization can make a better decision for a child than a mother if she is acting as a good Christian.
I think that history has proven that most organizations make decisions in their own self interest.
Abortion has become such a political hot potato that it is used by the pro and anti crowds for their own interest and without thought for the unborn. I think it is time for the Republican party to forget about laws and lead by example. Proudly state that your are against abortion, but take away the ability of the left to hammer any politician on being against privacy and other false arguments. The Conservatives should use every chance they are given, especially in debates and interviews,to educate people against abortion and not be drawn into a fight that can’t be won in Congress. This would take away the fear, whether rational or not, but in the Brazilian case it wasn’t irrational, and lead to many conservative young women to vote for people that they may not have voted for in the past. Use the pro-abortion crowd’s tactics against them. Get creative. Innocent lives are lost in every war but is it better to loose and get more Obama’s or win in the end and save lives and our Constitution.
This in no way means that I don’t think that late term abortions are not murder and should be treated as such. My wife had the son of a women that killed her newborn at birth in her class this year. The woman was sentenced to life in prison. The sequence was very similar to some of the late term abortions. Whay is a physician exempt from a murder charge if the child is born alive and left to die, but not the mother? There was no comment from any of our local clergy, the Archbishop as well as the faculty at the local Baptist seminary didn’t use this as a chance to educate the public. So what is their agenda?
I’m against abortion but my tactics are different than many and I have no political or financial motive.
Nothing that the Church says or said implies that the nine-year-old is less innocent than the unborn baby. What the Church teaches implies NO judgment that one life is more valuable than the other.
NEITHER the mother nor the baby may be KILLED.
It may be that both can survive. It may be that one will die. The Church teaches that NEITHER ONE may be KILLED.
The Fifth Commandment says: Thou shalt not kill (murder).
It does not say: Thou shalt not kill (murder) unless by doing so you stand to gain something.
What the Church said about the Brazilian case had nothing to do with bishops and priests huddled in a smoke-filled room, and coming out with a “decision.” What the Church has said is what EVERY Father of the Church has taught about the meaning of the Fifth Commandment. What EVERY Pope and Council has taught. And what every prophet since Moses himself has taught about the Commandment. The prohibition against murder is absolute. It simply is ALWAYS wicked. It is ALWAYS a crime.
What the Church teaches cannot be modified in order to entice a few young women who are on the fence to vote Republican. The Catholic Church can’t approve of “a little bit of murder,” or “a reasonable number of murders.”
The Catholic Church asserts that IT is Jesus Christ, present on earth through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. It is nonsensical to expect the Church to teach that murder is wrong, sinful, wicked, and then to call some acts of murder “Christian.” Sinful, wicked acts are, necessarily, logically, UNChristian. No one who deliberately kills any innocent human being is “acting as a Christian.” What can that even MEAN? That they sing a hymn while killing a baby? That they speak in tongues while killing a baby?
History does not support your position on the Church.
Oh? There are Fathers, Popes, and Councils who have SUPPORTED murder?
Rhetorical I suppose?
No.
Inquisition’s ???????????
What “Inquisition’s”?
I guess you don’t believe in sin either.
Well to end this useless exchange you might watch Monty Python for a clue.
By the way denial ain’t a river.
I really don’t believe your a Catholic Priest, most probably a lay person wannabe.
Denial isn’t just a river in Brazil.
I have to admit I do like your sense of humor.
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