Step Aside, Mr. Foxman: Your Remarks About Rush Are Out of Bounds

Abe Foxman has come out against a great and wonderful friend of the Jews, Rush Limbaugh. That is bad enough, but it is symptomatic of a deeper problem: I have for years derided Jews in America and the Jewish lay leadership for tolerating and supporting clear and present enemies of the Jewish people among our senior ranks. It is a sickness of the soul. The liberal Jew worships at the church of human secularism. These lost souls are married to their liberal dogma.

One of the most odious of the bunch, Abe Foxman, uses the might and the soapbox of the Anti-Defamation League in an attempt to destroy friends and supporters of the Jewish people, in order to garner favor with our enemies.

On Friday Norman Podhoretz, whom I rarely cite, as his capitulation on Gaza and other existential matters of grave concern to the Jewish people have been most damaging, called Foxman out on the ADL chief’s denunciation of Rush Limbaugh as an anti-Semite. The author of the book Why Are Jews Liberals? (from which Rush was quoting), Podhoretz called Foxman’s attack on Rush “vile” and noted that Foxman has:

… a long history of seeing an anti-Semite under every conservative bed while blinding himself to the blatant fact that anti-Semitism has largely been banished from the Right in the past forty years, and that it has found a hospitable new home on the Left, especially where Israel is concerned… if an apology is owed here, it is the national director of the Anti-Defamation League who should apologize for the defamatory accusation of anti-Semitism that he himself has hurled against so loyal a friend of Israel as Rush Limbaugh.”

As a passionate, proud Jew, I too stand with Rush Limbaugh and would take up against Foxman in a heartbeat. Thank G-d for righteous Gentiles like Rush. He is beyond delicious. He has such a yiddische heart, I’d marry him under a chupa!

Earlier this week, I posed a political question in the process and in the context of trying to help a friend and my audience understand the concept that people ask me about a lot: “Why are so many Jewish people liberal?” And a friend of mine — a good friend of mine, Norman Podhoretz — has written a book, an excellent book to explain it.

What I suspect is the usual thing that happened. Somebody took a few words that I said in a pretty long monologue, cut them up, and published them in a way to make it appear I said something that I didn’t say, and rather than check it out… And by now I would think anybody in the mainstream media or in any mainstream American endeavor, after 20 years of these types of attacks — me being taken out of context and every one of them being shown to be wrong, every one of these attacks being shown to be fallacious — I would think that by now some people would realize what’s going on. But I don’t think that they do. I think they want these attacks to be real. I think they want the out-of-context quotes to be real.

Abe Foxman, on the other hand, is a plague on our people. Foxman has come out repeatedly against one of the greatest friends of the Jews and Israel, my friend the Dutch Parliamentarian Geert Wilders. Foxman strongly condemned remarks Wilders made at a conference at which I also spoke (see here). At that conference, Wilders called Israel a “wonderful country,” and affirmed: “I love it, I do love Israel.” A resident of Israel for several years, Wilders said:

Israel is a Beacon of Light in an area, the Middle East, that is pitch black everywhere else… Israel is not just fighting for itself, Israel is fighting for all of us, for the entire West, just like those brave American soldiers who landed in Sicily in 1943 and stormed the Normandy beaches in 1944.

That’s not all. Back in August 2007, I demanded Foxman’s resignation after his continual denials of the Armenian genocide. We, as a people, cannot condone such unspeakable silence. We, of all people, must never be silent about the systemic death of a people. This Islamic genocide was heinous and brutal. And considering the level of Islamic anti-Semitism in the Koran and Sunnah, it would be healthy and good for living Jews (and all decent and good people) to denounce roundly the Islamic genocide of the Armenian people.

But Abe Foxman not only would take that basic fundamental stand, but he went one step further. He fired Andrew Tarsy, the ADL’s New England regional director, after he broke ranks with national leadership and said the human rights organization should acknowledge the Armenian genocide that began in 1915. Dr. Andrew Bostom said at the time that Foxman “apparently thinks that [he] can pick and choose among genocides… In a telephone interview, James Rudolph, the regional ADL chairman, called Tarsy an extraordinary leader. Indeed, Tarsy was acting in the best ADL tradition of trying to unite people of different ethnic groups, in this case Jews and Armenians, to promote human rights.”

If the national ADL doesn’t acknowledge the genocide, it is complicit in a cover-up.

Back in 2006, I took Foxman out for his attacks on those dear and precious friends of Israel, the Evangelical Christians. And Caroline Glick said this of Foxman that same year: “Rather than stand with the Catholic church as Benedict moves boldly against radical Islam, American Jewish leaders led by ADL Director Abe Foxman have been attacking the church for its theological decisions.” Foxman also came out in support of the Islamic school in Brooklyn whose principal was forced to resign because of her involvement in anti-Semitic “Intifada NYC” t-shirts (see here).

See the pattern? Foxman demonizes Christian groups that love Israel but is kowtowing to the Islamic jihad.

Our Jewish leadership has failed us miserably. One only has to look at the lack of response to Israel’s defensive action in Gaza last winter to see the terrible situation we are in. We have failed the Jewish youth, who haven’t a clue as to who we are and why we must fight for our survival. I’ve attended anti-Israel rallies — the Muslim youth come out in full jihad drag. It is an event, a destination. It is theater. Jewish youth, by contrast, were conspicuously absent from pro-Israel rallies. Why wasn’t Foxman in front of the curve on this? Why wasn’t he helping to organize counter-protests against the Islamic rallies calling for Jewish genocide? Why didn’t he rally the Jewish day schools, Hebrew schools, synagogues, Christian Zionists, and all friends of Israel to come together and march against this scourge?

We should be fiercely defending our right to fight for our survival. We need proud, unapologetic, vigorous Jews to lead our people now. Mr. Foxman, please step aside. Please step aside now, for the sake of the Jews.

Rush's comments

RUSH: I want to talk about the shift in independents in Massachusetts for just a second. It was a massive shift: 73% of unaffiliated voters went to Scott Brown last night. A lot of people ask me, and they have for years, why so many Jewish people are liberals. People don't understand it. It's a hard question. I can't answer it. I've come up with a number of different answers. My best theory is that liberals, no matter who they are, are liberals first and anything else they are is second. But Norman Podhoretz has written a book about it. He's Jewish. He's a conservative Jewish guy, and he's run Commentary magazine and their website. He's just brilliant. It's good fortune that I've been able to meet him. And the reason I thought of it is because Scott Brown had a lot of success with independents, and that's what Jewish liberals like to call themselves when they're asked.

They call themselves independents before they'll refer to themselves as liberals. So if Jewish people voted 78% for Obama -- which is far higher than any other group except African-Americans. If Jewish people gave Obama 78% of their vote, what if they're experiencing buyer's remorse like all these people in Massachusetts did? Do you realize how important this could be? I don't think there's buyer's remorse yet in the black community. That's still pretty strong. But what...? Remember, now, Jewish people, Jewish liberals call themselves independents and 78% of them voted for Obama. What if they are experiencing buyer's remorse and could be persuaded to desert Obama and the Democrats in general? If it's possible, if that's happening behind the scenes and we don't see it, it suggests that Scott Brown's victory could be even more indicative of an even bigger change in the political temper of the country that has so far been recognized -- and I think it's something worth considering. Now, if you have often wondered -- just out of, you know, a legitimately cure political sense.

If you have asked yourself: Why are so many Jewish people liberal when it seems that so much of what liberals do would be anathema to Jewish people, particularly abortion, but any number of things, taxes, tax increases. Look, folks, there are a lot of people who when you say "banker," people think "Jewish." People who have prejudice is the best way to put it. They have a little prejudice about them. So for some people, "banker" is code word for "Jewish," and guess who Obama's assaulting? He's assaulting bankers. He's assaulting money people, and a lot of those people on Wall Street are Jewish. So I wonder if there's starting to be some buyer's remorse there. Anyway, if you have often asked that question -- if you've been puzzled by so many Jewish people voting liberal, voting Democrat -- give Norman's book a shout. It's called Why Jews Are Liberals. And he's Jewish, and he would know. Look, it's a good read. Norman is a... There's no other way to say it: He's a profound intellectual but he's not an egghead elitist, and he's written this with an effort to have anybody that reads it understand exactly what he is talking about.

Not the best worded piece, but Foxman continues his role as court Jew for the left in calling conservatives antisemties.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.