Potemra, about whom I know nothing, raises a thought I have often had.

As he puts it, “Part of the problem, in the United States at least, has to do with elitist contempt for Evangelical Christians”.  I am beginning to believe that much of the global elite’s anti-Americanism stems from just this contempt, which is actually embarrassment with the subject of Christianity.  Evangelicals are the ones consistently bringing up God and morality in public discourse, making us all feel awkward since we have nothing much to say on the subject.  So we treat vocal Christians as embarrassing redneck relatives, changing the subject when they’re listening, and mocking them when they’re not.

I must write more on this soon.  In the meantime, here is the post.

_____________________________

Why Do They Hate Israel?   [Mike Potemra]

 Mark Steyn recently reminded us of some European polling from a few years ago, showing that the public consensus was growing on the Continent that Israel is the greatest threat to world peace. The recent global rage against Israel over the Gaza flotilla incident suggests that the trend has not abated. But the American people are resisting it — a recent poll shows them supporting Israel over the flotilla activists by a margin of 49 percent to 19 percent. But as someone who was a child in the late 1960s and early 1970s, at a time when public consciousness of the history of the Holocaust was on the rise, and the bravery of Israel in defense of its values against heavy odds in the Six Day War captured the imagination, I think the trend toward hatred of Israel is more than counterintuitive; it suggests insanity. In a context of fanatical regimes brandishing genocidal threats, posing a danger not just to Israel itself but to the whole world, it would make more sense for global solidarity with Israel to be on the rise. The rest of the world has even more at stake in Israel today than we did when the recapture of the Old City stirred so many romantic hearts.

I happened to be reading Elie Wiesel’s 1970 novel, A Beggar in Jerusalem, which is set in the period of the 1967 war and its aftermath. The main character recounts a conversation with his Hasidic master, for whom he had a question: “I can conceive of God’s wanting to punish us for reasons that are His and not necessarily ours; but why do entire nations, so many nations, aspire to become His whip, His sword?” The rabbi responds:

“The Jews are God’s memory and the heart of mankind. We do not always know this, but the others do, and that is why they treat us with suspicion and cruelty. Memory frightens them. Through us they are linked to the beginning and the end. By eliminating us they hope to gain immortality. But in truth, it is not given to us to die, not even if we wanted to. Why? Perhaps because the heart, by its nature, by its vocation too, cannot but question memory. We cannot die, because we are the question.” 

Once when I defended Israel, an angry blogger accused me of believing in the eternal sinlessness of the State of Israel. It is a strange charge, because I can’t recall hearing a similar one made in any other context. I am, for example, a Francophile and a Polonophile, but when I defend certain aspects of France or Poland nobody accuses me of fanatical worship of these countries; people know that if I disagree with some policy of the French or Polish government I feel free to say so. The same is true in the case of Israel, of course: but support for Israel is viewed with a unique level of suspicion. Why? In the absence of rational-empirical explanations, it is not irrational to look to the realm of mystery, and of theology.

Part of the problem, in the United States at least, has to do with elitist contempt for Evangelical Christians: Those ignorant Bible-thumpers give Israel a free pass on everything because they think that Bible prophecies require unthinking support for today’s Israeli state. Now, I am myself an Evangelical Christian of a sort (I am nominally an Episcopalian, and harbor an undying affection for the Catholic Church I grew up in, but my ecclesiology is firmly in the free-church tradition of today’s U.S. Evangelicalism). Yet I do not view the current State of Israel as an object of apocalyptic concern. If its enemies manage to wipe it off the face of the earth, the Jewish people will endure; their role as God’s question to man — as Wiesel’s rabbi suggested — would persist, even after millions of them were slain (yet again). Or, to put it in an even more sobering way: The destruction of the State of Israel would not put an end to anti-Semitism.

No, the support for Israel that is offered by me and like-minded people is based not on headline-devouring apocalypticism but on something perduring and eternal: a sense that the fate of the Jews implicates humanity, that a world that refuses to find a place for the Jews is engaged in a rejection of even more fundamental truths. This State of Israel is, yes, a state like all other states; that should go without saying. But how strange that, of all the 200 or so states-just-like-other-states in the world today, this one alone is treated increasingly as a pariah that’s on a deserved path to being wiped out.

I am not ashamed to say that some of my own support for Israel is based in religious motives, even if these motives are not those presented in caricature form by the cultured despisers. And I resent the caricature less than I otherwise would, because I view it as rooted in a deeper obtuseness, the one these despisers show in regard even to their own self-interest and to their own intellectual consistency. The only country in the region with liberal values — that lets, e.g., its religious minorities vote; that has, e.g., gay-pride parades — is the one they view as an embarrassment. This, again, is a level of obtuseness that cannot be explained on a purely rational basis.

What will become of Israel — and the Mideast generally, and the U.S., for that matter — is a question far above my pay grade. The side of good may not prevail, in the short or even the medium term. But I am proud to be on the side I’m on.

Anyway, take a look and see if you don’t agree. 

See “A Dialogue with Mr. Frankie Sturm on Iran” here.

But not on all issues. In the Middle East and around the world today, a struggle of titanic proportions is taking shape. The battles are still small by 20th-century standards. In Afghanistan and Iraq, US troops fight in the field.  Around the globe, security forces try to thwart murderous terrorists before they can strike at civilian targets.  Under multiculturalist banners, unassimilable immigrants demand recognition of Sharia law, accommodation of “honor killings”, and punishment for anti-Islamic speech.

On this issue, I take sides. 

I believe I am disinterested; I do not know a single Israeli citizen, or buy Israel bonds, or invest in Israeli companies.

I believe I am relatively well-informed, though one does have to pick one’s way through a lot of anti-Semitic garbage in most of the media to get to the truth. (One of the best sources is the Middle East Media Research Institute at www.memri.org.)

And I try to be dispassionate. But the spectacle of Israel, a beleaguered island of democracy being hounded by a pack of vicious terrorists and a worldwide elite of self-righteous anti-Semites is enough to get under my skin. Helen Thomas was only the latest example of someone making the mistake of saying out loud in the wrong company what is being increasingly thought by too many others: “The Jews should get out of Palestine!”  Israel was a mistake. The Mideast would be fine and the world peaceful if only those Jews hadn’t persuaded Truman and others to let them return home. (See an earlier post on this here.) You can see the Arab/Iranian rejectionists’ point. After all, they didn’t perpetrate the Holocaust! (Most of them can’t even believe such a thing could happen!)

But, like Henry II, we are all expected to keep it to ourselves when we wonder “who will rid us of this meddlesome democracy?”

And now, Iran openly prepares the ultimate weapon for Holocaust II. As if Hitler had published the Wannsee Plans in the New York Times, Ahmadinejad openly savors the day when he will receive the keys to a one-day genocide weapon.  (I know, “he’s not really in charge, the Imams are, and they’re level-headed fellows, so they’d never do anything crazy, so don’t worry.”)

The world’s response, increasingly led by the US, is to “tsk- tsk” the whole business.  Iran really shouldn’t do that, says Obama. The UN says the world should implement mild sanctions against Iran – up to whatever level Russia and China think compatible with their roles as Iran’s BFF, resulting in the feeblest sanctions ever imposed with a straight face. 

Iran, as vulnerable to serious sanctions as any nation anywhere (they export all their oil and import all their gasoline, for crying out loud), laughs at the pathetic face-saving gestures of the West. They can afford to laugh as their centrifuges hum around the clock, because they know two basic facts. First, no nation (except Israel) regards Israel’s survival as a priority. And second, no nation (except Israel) will go to war to protect Israel from a nuclear-armed Iran.

Obama may pretend that the US would retaliate against a nuclear attacker of Israel. There was a time when that would have been assumed by any potential aggressor; but no longer. With Obama working the appeasement angle like nobody since you-know-who in the 1930′s, in fact since the Democratic Party dedicated itself to worldwide pacifism in 1972, no sane Israeli (or anti-Israeli) could assume US protection.  That is in fact the reason Israel had to develop its own nuclear deterrent.

Consider this possible scenario: Iran launches a nuclear strike against Israel, wiping out most of the 6 million Jews residing there. Israel responds with a nuclear counter-strike from its remaining assets, taking out every possible Iranian military and economic target (Israeli has never intentionally attacked non-military targets).

What would be the US response? A nuclear retaliatory attack on Iran? Why? Haven’t they suffered enough? A conventional attack on Iran? Why bother?

The likeliest response which Obama’s record and rhetoric suggest:

1) A UN Security Council resolution condemning both parties;

2) Strong sanctions against Iran, until a new government is formed;

3) An aid mission to help find any surviving Jews in the rubble;

4) Creation of a blue-ribbon panel to determine why this “man-made disaster” occurred;

5) Congressional hearings to make sure this does not occur again;

6) The rapid petro-dollar-fueled re-building of Iran, under the 12th Imam or a Persian Weimar Republic;

7) The relocation of “The Zionist Entity” to Poland or somewhere;

8 ) The building of new annexes on every Holocaust museum in the world, adorned with the bold slogan “Never Again, Again”;

9) At some far distant date, a public apology by some future US president.

As I said, I try to remain dispassionate. I really do.

His philosophical musings are always perceptive and intersting, if you like things like that.  WARNING:  Sometimes he sounds rather Christian for a philosopher.  But he tells me he’s not actually affiliated, just stumbling around in the dark.

Anyway, like Danton’s head, it’s worth a look.

A few years ago, two professors wrote a book.  Stephen Walt (Harvard) and John Mearsheimer (Chicago) published The Israel Lobby in 2007, and it made quite a splash.  Its central thesis was that US foreign policy was directed by Israel and its friends, to the detriment of America’s real interests.  In other words, the Jews are running this country.

 Accusations of anti-Semitism arose, but were deftly parried by the authors and their defenders.  It’s about Israel, they responded; it has nothing to do with Jews!

(This is why I wish that Ben Gurion had given the Zionist entity a different name, like maybe Semitia.  But then the world’s W’s and M’s would have patiently explained that they are not anti-Semites, but anti-Semitians.  If he’d named it Jewland, W and M could explain that their problem is with Jewlandians, not Jews. Oh, well.)

 Here I note that I venture no judgment on the inner prejudices of W and M.  But I do note that if you check their book on Amazon, you will learn that “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought: The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine; Beyond Chutzpah; On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism; Palestine: Peace, Not Apartheid (by Jimmy Carter); The Holocaust Industry; and The Power of Israel in the United States.”  I know that guilt is not proven by association.  You may draw your own conclusions.

 So, in the dark days of the dreaded neocon likudnik administration of George W. Bush, professors M and W surveyed US mideast policy and made an interesting discovery.  Every action occurred in Israel.  The Muslim states were mere passive observers, reacting to Israeli and US provocations.  The best example was in their look at Iran. 

 “Israel’s perception of the Iranian threat underwent a fundamental change in the early 1990’s, as evidence of Teheran’s nuclear ambitions began to accumulate.  Israeli leaders began warning Washington in 1993 that Iran was a grave threat not only to Israel but to the US as well.  There has been no letup in that alarmist and aggressive rhetoric since then, largely because Iran has continued to move ahead on the nuclear front.”

 “Israel and the lobby are also troubled by Iran’s…refusal to accept Israel’s right to exist.”

 OK.  I could quote this stuff for pages, but you get the idea.  Iran develops nuclear weapons, threatens to destroy Israel, develops missiles that can strike Europe, and the problem is…Israel’s “alarmist and aggressive rhetoric”. 

 Bending over backwards to excuse Iran’s official ideology of “Death To Israel”, W and M write: “Ahmadinejad’s call for Israel ‘to vanish from the pages of time’ (or to be ‘erased from the pages of history’) is often mistranslated as a call for Israel’s physical destruction (i.e., to ‘wipe Israel off the map’).”  How unreasonable of the Jews not to be reassured by such a clarification!

 The Israel Lobby was not merely an indictment, but also a call for a new foreign policy.  As they argue, the US hard-line approach since 1993 (under both Bush and Clinton) “has left the US worse off than if it had pursued a strategy of engagement.”  So, they argue for a new direction. 

 “This alternative approach asserts that while it would be better for the US if Iran did not acquire nuclear weapons, there is good reason to think a nuclear Iran could be contained and deterred…” 

(It is not clear why they think it would be better for the US if they didn’t get nukes, after they spend pages explaining away any Iranian threat.  And it should be noted that, in this scholarly, meticulously-footnoted book, there is no note explaining the “good reason” for believing in deterrence of fanatical 12th-Imam ideologues.)  

 Back to the new foreign policy.  “The best way to stop Iran from building nuclear weapons is to engage it diplomatically and attempt to normalize its relationship with the US.”

 OK.  So we elected Barack Obama.  He disavowed any “special relationship” with Israel.  He reached out to Iran. He apologized for our past misdeeds.  He offered engagement and normalization.

 The question, professors, is this. How is that working out?

 He tells me that he has reached three very tentative conclusions.

 First, he has concluded that morality is not derivable or sustainable without religion, and religion (however useful) is false without God.  I may ask him to explain that to me at some point.

 Second, while random events (such as undirected evolution) may explain much or all of the physical world, they do not explain the human mind, which is more than a super-computer built of nerve ganglia.  Our very contemplation of God suggests that the mind is not fully explained by materialist science; the mind indicates that God exists. It is true that we can imagine things that don’t exist, such as unicorns; but horns and horses do exist.

 Third, God may be like the horizon – the framework against which everything else is placed and comprehended.  The horizon exists, though not as other things exist; it is the reference point-line, the directional, the seen and unseen background before which all else is locatable. Of course in practical terms it is the curved falling away of the earth’s surface, and as such it is tangible and measurable (I have heard that it is about five miles away from a six-foot-tall man at seaside or in Kansas.)  But it also has a strong and intangible reality.

 Doolittle may be on to something here. But, I wonder, what if the earth were flat, unbounded, infinite?  Would there not still be a horizon?  Would it look the same as it presently does? 

 Maybe the relation of such an infinite horizon is to our actual horizon tells us something of our comprehension of God in relation to God’s reality.

 Oh well, that is all “beyond my pay grade”.  I must ask Mr. D to tell me more.

=================

Comment here.

The Iranian regime of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad today poses a grave and imminent threat to world peace. A wealthy nation, led by apocalyptic anti-Semitic fanatics committed to the eradication of a neighboring nation, is rapidly developing the weapons that will put that goal within its reach.

The whole world knows it; indeed, Iran barely bothers to deny it.

The Iranian regime is and has always been an avowed and implacable enemy of both Israel and of our own country. Their hatred of us and their desire to destroy Israel are not new. What is new is their development of the weapons needed to accomplish their goal of a Jew-free Middle East.

There can be no mistake; the Iranian regime is preparing for its “Final Solution” to the problem of Israel – nothing less than a Second Holocaust. Their denial of Nazi genocide is a smokescreen to distract attention from their plans to out-murder Hitler. With a weapon that Hitler could only dream of, Iran will have instant genocide – the extermination of 6 million Israeli Jews in a single day – at their fingertips.

Diplomacy and sanctions have been tried and have not worked. China (politely) and Russia (rudely) have made it clear (repeatedly) that they will oppose or sabotage serious sanctions. Sanctions will not work under such circumstances.

The Iranians have played the diplomacy game to the hilt, engaging in endless talks while ceaselessly working on their weapons program. They have adhered to Will Rogers’ cynical definition of diplomacy as “Saying ‘nice doggy’ in a soothing voice while stooping to pick up a rock.” They know that time is on their side; they have learned the North Korean lesson that once they demonstrate that they have nuclear weapons, world pressure will avail nothing against them.

So they will continue to play the game, running out the clock while their centrifuges spin day and night. In this situation, and given the demonstrated nature of the regime, it would be the height of irresponsible folly to set further meaningless timelines. If a last diplomatic offer is made, it must contain a deadline measured in days, not months.

For the 30 years since the Iranian Revolution, Israel has been our staunchest ally and Iran our most implacable enemy. That ally now stands threatened with extinction from that enemy. We cannot hesitate to act.

The failure of the previous and current U.S. administrations to deal with this threat have left very few options on the table. In the face of continued Iranian intransigence, some form of military action, such as surgical air strikes to disrupt the Iranian weapons program, may be the only course remaining. If Israel is ready to act in its own defense, we should offer them our full support and assistance.

Military action must be a last resort; its cost is high and its success uncertain. But the cost of continued failure to act is clear and will be terrible. “Learning to live with a nuclear Iran,” as some “realists” propose, is in reality learning to live with genocide.

Seven decades ago, an aggressive and fanatical dictator threatened both the peace of Europe and the Jews of Europe. The powers that could have stopped him chose instead to try to appease him. Appeasement did not work then and it will not work now.

For more information on the Iran threat, I recommend:

Middle East Media Research Institute, at www.memri.org, and United Against Nuclear Iran at www.uani.com.

?????????????????????????????

Leave your comment here.

Sad that it is so funny.  But still funny.  I don’t care who you are.

Tomorrow’s headline:  China rejects Iran sanctions, even as Russia softens its position.

The Day after Tomorrow’s headine: China tags out, Russia tags into Iran-defense match.

Several things become clearer every day.

First, Iran is playing its diplomatic stalling game with masterful finesse.  They have been at the table for years with the Europeans, and now with us. Feeble sanctions are enacted, and then flouted by various nations.  And in the background, the steady hum of thousands of gas centrifuges, both in Qom and Natanz, creating the stuff of Iran’s dream: the Jew-liquidating Final Solution: the Mullah Of All Bombs.

Second, Russia and China are not displeased with Iran’s challenge to the West, and will not impede it in any way.  But, to avoid burning all bridges to the West, Russia and China will continue to play tag-team in threatening to veto any UN Security Council action, swapping the good-cop/bad-cop roles from time to time.  They know that the present US administration will not consider military pressure on Iran without a UN mandate.  Russia and China are Iran’s insurance policy against any possible UN action.  With their backing, Iran fears no sanctions, and has zero incentive to negotiate in good faith.

As our president receives worldwide acclaim (or at least Norway-wide) for his policy of appeasing Iran’s “legitimate concerns” in endless “good-faith” negotiations, my mind again wanders back seventy-some years, to the last comparable exercise in appeasement of dictators.

I have written about Obama’s appeasement as Chamberlain revisited, here, here, and here.  I have quoted Churchill, Clement Attlee, and Neville Chamberlain himself.  Now I bring a new voice to bear:  John F. Kennedy.

As a Harvard student in 1940, in part to distance himself from his father’s by-then-discredited views, JFK published a book, Why England Slept, analyzing England’s 1930’s appeasement policy and its roots in pacifism and isolationism.  In discussing the British government’s wild under-estimation of the Nazi threat, he writes:

“Baldwin [Chamberlain’s predecessor as PM] should be condemned for his blindness and his unwillingness to face unpleasant facts, but I do not believe that he and his entire cabinet knowingly betrayed the country.  They all made the mistake of misjudging Germany’s potentialities and the Nazi psychology.”

There is every reason to believe that the same mistakes are being made today by our president.  “Unwillingness to face unpleasant facts” is a matter of pride with him.

[Flashback: Bullwinkle: “Watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat!”  Rocky: “That trick never works.”  Bullwinkle: “This time for sure.” Bullwinkle (after trick fails): “I gotta get a new hat.”]

John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s voice speaks to us from the past, and today’s Democratic Party, believing that history began in 2000, or 1972 at the earliest, is incapable of understanding the words.

In the blink of an eye he has moved the world’s only superpower firmly into the appeasement camp. This has been the Western left’s greatest foreign policy goal for the past eight years, and Obama has delivered on it.

Without creating much of a stir, he has notified our enemies that they need not fear us, and our allies that they cannot count on us.

Meanwhile, Iran arms itself for the coming annihilation of 6 million Jews, and the world prepares itself by stigmatizing Israel and legitimizing anti-Semitism.