*This post is now complete*
Clyde Haberman starts off well:
Once a year, the Israel-threatening, Holocaust-denying, nuke-building and child-hanging president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, comes to New York for the opening ceremonies of the United Nations General Assembly.
Many New Yorkers don’t like having him around. But they have no choice. Foreign leaders must be allowed to attend these sessions, no matter how Israel-threatening, Holocaust-denying, nuke-building and child-hanging they may be.
Glad he recognizes what Ahmadinejad is.
However, the article goes down from there. Haberman leaves out the part that the organizers did invite Biden who was otherwise occupied. And it’s nice of him dismiss that the whole episode angered “some Jews on the right.” Nice way to disparage those you disagree with. But of course he doesn’t mention the organized effort by Democrats to sink the Palin speech. And then he offers this observation:
But people on the left saw no equivalence between the Democratic senator and the Republican governor. Only one of them is a candidate. Inviting Ms. Palin, they charged, tilted the rally toward the Republican national ticket — an impression not likely to be dispelled by the many signs on Monday supporting Senator John McCain and none backing Senator Barack Obama.
Game. Set. Match to the Left.
Not so fast. In reaction to the partisan tactics of the left, many on the right stayed away. That’s an observation that Atlas made. So if the right wing groups stayed away, how was it that there were more McCain signs than Obama signs?
1) As a reaction to the partisan maneuvering of those allied with the Obama campaign, quite a few protesters of Ahmadinejad registered their dissatisfaction with the campaign that politicized the event.
2) The left wing groups had little interest in attending if Sen. Clinton wasn’t speaking.
Overall Haberman’s observation is based on a false assumption that because there were more McCain signs after the flap, it meant that the protest was partisan in its planning.
Gateway Pundit has more.
Caroline Glick distilled things with doesn’t pull her punches when assigning blame to the likes of the NDJC and J-Street.
LIBERAL AMERICAN Jews, like liberal Americans in general, and indeed like their fellow leftists in Israel and throughout the West, uphold themselves as champions of human rights. They claim that they care about the underdog, the wretched of the earth. They care about the environment. They care about securing American women’s unfettered access to abortions. They care about keeping Christianity and God out of the public sphere. They care about offering peace to those who are actively seeking their destruction so that they can applaud themselves for their open-mindedness and tell themselves how much better they are than savage conservatives.
Those horrible, war-mongering, Bambi killing, unborn baby defending, God-believing conservatives, who think that there are things worth going to war to protect, must be defeated at all costs. They must intimidate, attack, demonize and defeat those conservatives who think that the free women of the West should be standing shoulder to shoulder not with Planned Parenthood, but with the women of the Islamic world who are enslaved by a misogynist Shari’a legal code that treats them as slaves and deprives them of control not simply of their wombs, but of their faces, their hair, their arms, their legs, their minds and their hearts.
The lives of 6 million Jews in Israel are today tied to the fortunes of those women, to the fortunes of American forces in Iraq, to the willingness of Americans across the political and ideological spectrum to recognize that there is more that unifies them than divides them and to act on that knowledge to defeat the forces of genocide, oppression, hatred and destruction that are led today by the Iranian regime and personified in the brutal personality of Ahmadinejad. But Jewish Democrats chose to ignore this basic truth in order to silence Palin.
Solomonia writes somewhat more generally, but in the same vein.
And when it comes down to it, it’s not Jews in Israel that motivates Democrats, and it’s not Jews in America that motivates them either. It’s their own power. It’s their own little dinners, and board memberships, and their silly narcissistic college freshman platitudes…that’s what motivates them. And when they finally get around to looking out the window, their bogeyman isn’t an Iran armed with nuclear weapons led by a Holocaust-denying antisemitic America-hater…it’s “conservatives.” Ahmadinejad is, after all, an ocean away, but it’s conservatives here at home that prevent them from inflicting their peculiar vision of the worker’s paradise on all of the rest of us.
That may put an end to the gloating from J Street, anyway
That would be a good result from all of this.
Given that they claim to speak for American Jewry (and that was the pretext they used for opposing Palin’s speech, this result doesn’t look too good for them, does it? Too many more victories like this and that poll of Jewish New Yorkers may not be an outlier much longer.
Daled Amos links to an interview of Malcolm Hoenlein.
Crossposted on Soccer Dad.
