Item: Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, the Senate’s second highest-ranking Democrat, declared that U.S. conduct in our Guantanamo detention facility was of a piece with the concentration camps of the Nazis, Stalin’s Gulags and the killing fields of Pol Pot’s Cambodia.
Republicans demanded an apology as did the Anti- Defamation League, hardly a repository of Republican opinion. Four days after saying what he did, Durbin claimed he was misunderstood and Democrats adopted that as the party line. One can only assume that Democrats went along with Durbin because either they agreed with him or felt that a significant part of their base did. Disregarding or minimizing the Holocaust by inaccurate comparison is a mainstay of the far left and the far right, and Durbin’s remarks echoing those views brings them closer to the mainstream of our political debate.
Item: The late Abba Eban, Israel’s distinguished ambassador to the United Nations, once said about that body that if “Algeria introduced a resolution declaring that the Earth was flat and that Israel had flattened it, it would pass by a vote of 164 to 13 with 26 abstentions.” We don’t know where Israel would get 13 votes today, because the UN has become even more openly anti-Israel since Eban was there. It has also become stridently nasty towards the United States and scornful of Western values. If that weren’t enough, the United Nations is also dysfunctional and corrupt in the extreme.
President Bush wants the experienced and tough John Bolton to pursue our interests at the United Nations and attempt to bring some needed reform to the way it does things. Major Jewish organizations have all lined up behind this nomination. AIPAC, JINSA and ADL along with B’nai B’rith and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations all have endorsed Bolton for this post. Bolton is the President’s choice to impose standards of accountability and insist on reforms. Instead of realizing that it takes a tough guy to do these things and approving Bolton’s nomination, Senate Democrats are blocking it.
By criticizing Bolton’s interpersonal skills, Democrats have made him the issue, subordinating the nomination to their argument with the White House. Bolton’s record of support of Israel is strong, and he understands better than most the nature of the threat against it both in and out of the organization he would be entering. Many Democrats, who are normally strong supporters of Israel, have opted to go along with their party line rather than support President Bush’s nominee.
Item: Last week, House Democrats held a mock hearing, something parties out of power sometimes do, that ended up calling for the President’s resignation or impeachment. The catalyst was the recently “discovered” Downing Street Memo that supposedly indicts the administration for desiring regime change in Iraq prior to 9/11. Other interpretations of the same memo are more benign, but still, some 30 Democratic members of the House used it as reason to convene and make a public display of their disdain towards the President. Animus towards Israel was also in evidence.
Some of Israel’s most dependable friends in the House: Reps. Frank, Nadler, Lowey and Shackowski (Barney Frank now says he was out of the room when this took place) were present when former intelligence analyst Ray McGrath gave testimony that the “U.S. went to war in Iraq for oil, Israel, and military bases craved by administration ëneocons’ so the United States and Israel could dominate that part of the world.” Dana Milbank of The Washington Post supplied the quote, and his article also tells us that the hearings were broadcast back to Democratic headquarters where literature was handed out that repeated Arab inspired libels against Israel: that Israel had advance warning of 9/11, keeping them home from work on that day, and also that there were inside profits made from the information. (Thanks to Richard Baehr for this information. His article is on the Americanthinker.com website)
What’s going on here?
It’s possible that if this was the Congress of the 80s and George Bush was President, Jeanne Kirkpatrick would have trouble getting her nomination. This is much more about Bush and the Democrats than it is about who becomes ambassador. It’s as if the Prussian Carl Von Clausewitz’s famous dicta has been turned on its head and politics is now war by another name. There’s a reason that the Democrats are contentious.
John Martilla, a pollster for the John Kerry presidential campaign, tells us that rank and file Democrats feel outsourcing is a bigger problem for the U.S. than eliminating Al Qaeda. This is not far from the Michael Moore-MoveOn.org-Howard Dean position on those issues. It is clear too that those Democrats who hold those positions are also probably a wellspring of constant animosity towards the White House. (Thanks to Ari Melber in the NY Post, 6-20-05). The American-Israeli alliance, long supported by the Democratic Party is not well understood nor held in great esteem by that fraction of the Democratic Party either.
Because congressional support for Israel has been bi-partisan and because it has been so genuinely embraced by both sides, it has been strong and enduring. The Jewish community’s task is to make it that way again.

–nrg

Comments are closed.