The Jewish Vote: Stuck On Stupid

The occasion for this post is a question put to me Thanksgiving Day by a young man I have great respect for ─ a Born Again Christian whose father happens to be a Jew. He asked why so many American Jews vote for candidates whose policies run counter to their own self-interest.

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    In 2006 General Russell L. Honoré, in the course of answering questions at a post-Katrina news conference, told a reporter he was "stuck on stupid." The target of the general’s annoyance was an insignificant member of an insignificant class of American idiots known as Journalists.

    It seems to me that the same remark applies to an influential group of several million of my fellow citizens ─ American Jews.

    Here are some background data:

· Sixty percent of Conservatives sympathize with Israel rather than the Palestinians whereas only 33 percent of Liberals do.

Year in, year out, the vast majority of Jews vote for Liberal candidates.

· Sixty-nine percent of Republicans sympathize with Israel rather than the Palestinians whereas only 42 percent of Democrats do.

Fifty-two percent of American Jews believe the Democratic Party "is more likely to make the right decision" regarding American policy toward Israel compared with 32 percent who think the Republican Party will.

· In the run-up to the 2008 Presidential Election, candidate Obama made it clear (remember Joe the Plumber) that he wanted to redistribute wealth by taking money (income and savings) from the well-to-do ─ many of them Jews ─ and donating it to the less-well-off.

Seventy-eight percent of the Jewish vote in the 2008 Presidential election went to Barack Obama. Is it rational to vote for someone who wants to undermine one’s own well-being?

· Prior to its collapse in 1991, the Soviet Union, a vast pastiche of conquered peoples, had been supplying armaments to Israel’s enemies for decades, had crushed Jewish culture within its own borders, had denied its Jewish citizens the right to emigrate, and was the enemy of freedom everywhere.

In 1984. two-thirds of American Jews thought Ronald Reagan displayed poor judgment in calling the Soviet Union an Evil Empire.

· Most Liberals favor slashing America’s military expenditures, appeasing America’s enemies, and relying on multi-lateral solutions to the world’s ills via such anti-American, Jew-hating institutions as the United Nations.

Despite a world-wide resurgence in anti-Semitism ─ against which America is the main bulwark ─ American Jews overwhelmingly favor Liberal "Doves" over Conservative "Hawks."

· Among the preachings of Barack Obamas’s longtime Chicago pastor and moral mentor, Jeremiah Wright, the following stand out:

About America: "Not God Bless America. God damn America."
About 9/11: "America's chickens are coming home to roost."
About Jews in general: "The Jewish vote, the A-I-P-A-C vote, that’s controlling him [Obama], that would not let him send representation to the Darfur Review Conference, that’s talking this craziness on this trip, cause they’re Zionists, they would not let him talk to someone who calls a spade what it is."
About accessibility to the President: "Them Jews aren't going to let him talk to me."

    In a nationally televised speech Obama responded, "I can no more disown him [Wright] than I can disown ...my white grandmother."

After the speech Barack’s poll figures among Jewish voters began a steady climb from 60 percent to nearly 80 percent on election day     

    How to explain such perversity among a group of people considered by most to be reasonably bright, well-read, and politically savvy?
    Here are the usual excuses:

1. Jews traditionally consider themselves Doves.
2. Liberalism is at the core of the Jewish psychological anatomy. To "change sides," no matter how much in the Jews’ self-interest, would not be mere apostasy, it would be an almost physical destruction of self, a confession that a centuries-old philosophical rock of Jewish thought is nothing but a myth.
3. On the one hand, Jews believe in the basic "goodness" of man ─ that one is born good, but is taught evil. On the other hand, two thousand years of persecution at the hands of Europe’s Christians has left many with a visceral, if abstract, fear of Christianity. To resolve this conundrum American Jews have long secularized and admired Christian politicians who cloak themselves in "Progressivism" (Wilson, FDR, Gore, Kerry, Obama) while demonizing grass roots types such as Ronald Reagan, George Bush, and, most recently, Sarah Palin.

    Here’s what’s wrong with these excuses..

Jews are doves: Dovishness is a weasel-word for fear and cowardice. Given the history of the race, it’s understandable that many American Jews are reluctant to fight back when physically attacked, are fearful of provoking bullies, are in favor of disarmament, are against the right of citizens to own firearms. But understanding does not equate with being correct. American Jews would do well to learn from their brethren in Israel: It’s fine to love peace and hate war, but when push comes to shove ─ when the choice is either fight or be murdered as, alas, it too often is in this world of ours ─ the prudent man, the brave man, will take up the sword to protect himself and his loved ones rather than grovel at the feet of a barbarian and beg him for mercy that is unlikely to be granted.
Jews are Liberals: It is absurd to allow oneself to become a prisoner of a label ─ whether the label is "Conservative" or "Liberal" or "Progressive" or "Libertarian" or "Republican" or "Democrat" or "Socialist" or "Communist" or "Fascist" or anything ─ :particularly when these labels are so often unfurled by men whose real interest is in gathering power to themselves. The United States is a republic based on capitalism and democracy. Both these systems rely on enlightened self-interest, not on doctrinaire slogans, abstract moralizing, or inherited dogmas.
Jews distrust Christians: Whatever one may say about Jews ─ pro or con ─ no one can deny that they have long memories. Two thousand years of pogroms, autos-de-fé, random killings, discriminatory laws, false imprisonments, thefts, genocides, ghettos, expropriations, insults, government-sponsored riots, blood libels, physical abuse, mob violence, book burnings, torture, forced conversions, and daily indignities at the hands of European Christianity are inscribed like scars from a bull whip on the minds and literature and art and very souls of the race. All this, of course, capped by history’s most horrendous mass murder under the auspices of an enlightened Christian state led by its beloved Fuhrer and supported enthusiastically by almost all of European Christendom: French, Polish, Hungarian, Romanian, Greek, Italian, Albanian, Ukrainian, Russian, Slovakian, Croatian, Serbian, Austrian, Lithuanian, Latvian, Estonian ─ Catholic and Protestant and Orthodox alike.
    But what too many American Jews fail to understand, and perhaps never will, is that America is not Europe and that grass roots American Christians ─ God-fearing, conservative Baptists and Catholics and Jehovah’s Witnesses and Seventh Day Adventists and Born Agains and the rest (as opposed to the secularized left-wing veneer of elitist "Christian" leadership exemplified by The National Council of Churches) ─ are an entirely different breed than Europe’s Christians with their ineradicable, millennia-old hatreds and bigotries and perverse psychosexual longings..

    It is time and past time that America’s Jews acknowledge the fact that the people they fear and reject are the very ones who gave up their lives and continue to give up their lives to protect us all from the evils of Fascism and Nazism and Communism and fanatic Muhammadanism that infected and still infect so much of the World.
    And it is time and past time for American Jews to accept the bitter truth that all too often the people for whom they vote and have voted are the very people who despise them most.

Norm Mack, Peterborough, dog@myfairpoint.net

Posted by dome of glass at 12/9/2010 9:00 AM
Categories: Voting Patterns, Jews
Tags: Russell Honore Jeremiah Wright Obama
 

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  • 12/9/2010 11:07 AM Loren wrote:
    Makes a ton of sense. And also gives me such a sense of hopelessness for Jews in general all over the world.
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  • 12/15/2010 10:53 PM Nun wrote:
    I too have wondered, for a log time, why so many Jews are Liberal. It just does not make sense to be on the side that hates you for no reason. Sometimes I think that there there is nothing worse than than a liberal Jew. Fucking New Yorkers, screw them. Fortunatley, Jews are the only race with bigger cocks than than the Africans. And really, isn't that what really matters? Or is that what pisses off the significantly less blessed Europeans?
    Reply to this
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