Posted on 04/20/2002 11:05:09 AM PDT by scratchgolfer
Israel Winning Broad Support From U.S. Right
ALISON MITCHELL
Gary L. Bauer, the Christian conservative who grew up as a janitor's son in Kentucky, and William Kristol, the scion of New York Jewish intellectuals, long ago forged an unlikely but close friendship as warriors of the right.
They have fought together on issues like promoting family values and the Supreme Court nomination of Clarence Thomas. But the cause that now rivets them both is Israel, and their joint, consuming devotion to it illustrates the deep pro-Israel sentiment in the conservative movement.
The support comes from a broad band of people, from the national security-minded hawks who view Israel as the only democratic and dependable United States ally in the Middle East to religious conservatives who believe Israel is the covenant land promised to Jews by God.
Many of the conservative thinkers who influence the part of the party that President Bush considers his base have become loudly critical of his efforts at Middle East peace-making, calling them a muddled mission that undercuts his post-Sept. 11 antiterrorist doctrine.
The strongly pro-Israel sentiment marks a profound and telling shift inside the Republican Party, political strategists say. With Jews mostly voting Democratic, Republican presidents for decades had been freer to break with Israel. Dwight D. Eisenhower refused to back a British, French and Israeli attack on Egypt after it nationalized the Suez Canal. Mr. Bush's father's administration repeatedly clashed with Israel.
But now, Mr. Bauer, 55, the president of a research organization called American Values, often presses Israel's case in a daily e-mail message that makes its way to about 100,000 Christian conservatives. Mr. Kristol, 49, who edits The Weekly Standard, has criticized Mr. Bush's Middle East policy in his magazine and in memorandums fired off by the Project for the American Century, a foreign policy research group that he heads.
"We think you can't have a peace process in which one of the partners is a sponsor of terrorism," Mr. Kristol said. "Not if you're engaged in a serious war on terrorism."
They are far from alone. From Jewish neoconservatives like Mr. Kristol to Christian and social conservatives like Mr. Bauer, from the free-market conservatives of The Wall Street Journal editorial page to the talk radio host Rush Limbaugh, has come the same sharp message.
"Suddenly the president who soared by standing on principle seems to have been replaced by an impostor who's lost his foreign-policy bearings," The Journal said in its lead editorial earlier this week as Secretary of State Colin L. Powell came home from the Middle East empty-handed.
National Review, another keeper of the conservative flame, in its May 6 issue says "the administration has leaked away prestige and credibility with nearly every statement."
The seeds for the new Republican thinking were planted under Ronald Reagan when his robust anticommunism and advocacy of a strong missile defense drew to his side a group of influential, pro-Israel neoconservatives from the Democratic Party like Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, his United Nations ambassador, and Richard Perle, an assistant secretary of defense.
Mr. Reagan, who was strongly pro-Israel, also paved the way for the ascendancy of the Christian right inside the Republican Party. In what is now considered a seminal moment in the building of the Republican coalition, Mr. Reagan gave religious conservatives an honored place in the party by declaring before a convention of evangelical preachers, "You can't endorse me, but I endorse you."
The trends Mr. Reagan set in motion have only escalated, and Mr. Bush now has to contend with an even more dramatically altered Republican Party.
"For the first time in probably the history of the Republican Party a significantly pro-Israel constituency has to catch the eye of the White House," said Marshall Wittmann, who has an unusual perspective as a Jewish conservative who was once a lobbyist for the Christian Coalition.
Republicans attribute the conservative support for Israel to many factors, including the influence of largely Jewish neoconservatives and the rise of the Christian right, with its belief that the Bible mandates support for Israel. The Likud Party in Israel also built ties to conservatives. After the Sept. 11 attacks, other conservatives who embrace a hawkish foreign policy came to see a stand with Israel as important strategy in the war against terrorism.
The departure from Republican ranks of Patrick J. Buchanan and his followers also muted the voices of conservatives who were more critical of Israel.
"That was the part of the movement most skeptical of Israel and most pro-Arab," said Richard Lowry, the editor of National Review. "They are effectively out of the picture.'
Mr. Buchanan advocated closer ties between the United States and Iraq and Iran, and his past writings were criticized by some as anti-Semitic, a charge he vehemently denied. In the 1960's and earlier, the conservative movement included elements, like the John Birch Society, that were viewed as anti-Jewish.
These elements, too, have waned. Still, at times there are tensions in the pro-Israel alliance over issues like the proselytizing of Jews by fundamentalist Christians. In a recently released tape of a 1972 conversation, the Rev. Billy Graham agreed with President Richard M. Nixon that left-wing Jews dominated the news media. In an apology, Mr. Graham, now 83, said he should have disagreed with Mr. Nixon.
The pro-Israel constituency in Congress is now so broad that it transcends both party and ideology, with Representative Tom DeLay of Texas, the staunchly conservative House majority whip teaming up with Representative Tom Lantos, a Democrat of California, to introduce a resolution of solidarity with Israel.
"You have one of the most interesting political marriages of all times between the largely Jewish neoconservatives and the religious right in firm support for Israel, embodied by Bill Kristol and Gary Bauer," Mr. Wittmann said.
In fact the trajectory of the two says a lot about how the conservative movement came to support Israel.
Well before Mr. Kristol became one of Washington's most prodigious merchants of conservative ideas, his father, Irving, was an intellectual warrior from perches at journals and magazines like Commentary, Encounter and The Public Interest. He was the prototypical neoconservative who shifted from left to right as the Democratic Party moved from Hubert H. Humphrey to George McGovern.
Mr. Kristol followed in his father's footsteps. In 1972, as a student at Harvard College, he says, he handed out leaflets for Senator Henry M. Jackson's 1972 presidential run. But Mr. Jackson, a Democrat devoted to a strong military, suffered a string of defeats.
"I was generally for American strength and generally for American support for democracies around the world," Mr. Kristol said. "Support for Israel was part of that."
But soon his views led him to migrate to the Republican Party, where he eventually was chief of staff to Vice President Dan Quayle.
Mr. Kristol met Mr. Bauer when the two worked under William J. Bennett, in the Reagan Education Department, and fought together for ideas like bringing traditional family values into the classroom. They became such fast friends that for more than a decade their families have vacationed together at the Delaware shore.
Mr. Bauer, who ran unsuccessfully for the Republican presidential nomination in 2000, came to support of Israel from a different route than Mr. Kristol and represents a different strand of conservatism. "I'm a little different than some of my Republican friends," Mr. Bauer says, "in the sense that I know what it's like to grow up in a family where the paycheck lasts until about Wednesday and the bills last until Friday."
He became a Reaganite in high school when he saw Mr. Reagan's speech in 1964 on behalf of Barry Goldwater.
Mr. Bauer's support for Israel, he says, stems from both theology and ideology. "As an evangelical," he said, "I do believe the Bible is pretty clear that the land is what is called covenant land, that God made a covenant with the Jews that that would be their land."
But he also calls the United States and Israel "mutual allies" in a cold-war-style struggle between radical Islam and Western democracies.
For all their many long talks over the years, Mr. Kristol and Mr. Bauer cannot recall when they discovered their mutual commitment to Israel. But Mr. Kristol remembers asking his friend what kind of reaction his e-mail messages on the Middle East drew from his followers.
"He said, `They agree with me, and they are actually quite impassioned about it,' " Mr. Kristol recalled. "It was the first tipoff to me that it wasn't just that a lot of religious conservatives are pro-Israel, but that it was an important issue for them."
Only idiots can "understand" the "palestinian" justification for mayhem and murder.
If Mexicans were coming across the border to San Diego and going into crowded places and murdering people via explosive garments – I would think that our government would take aggressive action to stop it. It appears to me that this is more than a simile of what is happening in Israel.
I am embarrassed that we (America) haven’t been more united in our support of Israel doing whatever it has to do to gain “homeland security.”
--Eccl. 10:2
After all they have also performed crimes against humanity.
Let's see some evidence for your blood libel. Your goose is cooked!
P.S. You forgot to charge that the Jews kill gentile children, and use their blood in the baking of Passover matzos. I guess you were saving that one for another post.
Whenever people throw Washington's Farewell Address in your face, just remind them that he was talking about countries two months away from the U.S. No sensible American politician, at any point in our nation's history, has ever suggested that we ignore events taking place within a day of our borders—but thanks to modern transportation, that now encompasses the whole globe. Washington was a great and wise man, but he didn't foresee jet aircraft, ballistic missiles or nuclear submarines. That "foreign entanglements" quote is a great argument for remaining neutral with respect to warring tribes of Martians or Venusians, but events here on Earth have passed it by.
I will relate a little history instead. The first president I was old enough to vote for was Ronald Reagan. The country was a basket case, run into the ground by a hapless president. Gas lines were miles long. Oil was soaring to $40 a barrel. The country was humiliated for over a year by insane kidnappers in Teheran. A late military attempt to rescue them ended in fiasco. The Iranians displayed wreckage and body parts on international television. Meanwhile, Irsael was being condemned by the chattering classes for bombing a nuclear reactor in Iraq.
A few years later, Israel had enough of the PLO and went into Lebanon. When the US tried to broker a cease fire and Israeli withdrawl, and put our own men in harm's way to protect the Palestinians, Islamic radicals blew up 250 of them. They captured our pilots and held them hostage. Numerous American civilians were held hostage in Lebanon on one pretext or another.
In all of this, the clear impression was that very nasty people were out for our blood, and only the Israelis had the guts to stand up to them. Reagan was better than Carter, but still tread softly with the Arabs. Later we had to fight Saddam, and everyone told us it would be the end of the world if we tried. But he didn't have nukes, because somebody had the foresight to destroy his facilities long ago. He attacked Israel, which obeyed our demands to sit there and take it.
The attacks last fall were not the opening rounds in the current war. They were just the first time our enemies hit something here at home, hard enough that everybody really noticed. But some of us have been watching this war for 20 years, for the whole of our adult lives. Some of us were first seriously politicized by the Iran hostage crisis and the seeming inability of our government to do a darn thing about it. It was the symbol of the pathetic defeatism of the whole 1970s. Reagan and renewed American patriotism was a reaction against all that.
The enemies of Israel have been the enemies of America - and of the right in particular - for decades. The right has stood for standing up to such enemies, when the left has over and over again caved and appeased and wrung its hands. This is not new. It is not divorced from the issues of the present war, which did not just begin out of nowhere.
It is not a matter of personalities, identity politics, or recondite theological speculations. It is our direct political experience. The enemies of Israel have declared themselves our enemies, and they demand our submission. They have recently proven themselves rather dangerous. Which has simply brought more of the American middle over to views many of us on the right have held for 20 years.
Islamic radicalism declared war on us in 1979, when they first came to power in Iran, and there has never been any peace in that war. It has simply been burning hotter or colder, now and then, in this or that manifestation. That war is as much a part of the political consciousness of my generation, as the rise of communism was to earlier ones. Teheran was our October Revolution, and we drew up sides then and there.
Do not overlook that many of us have served in the meantime, or have had friends who have. When members of an international ideology want to kill you and your friends and your countrymen, it frees the mind of media cant. So yes, it is 9-11. It is also much older than 9-11. The right needs no urging to dislike Islamic radicals.
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