Bottoms Up

Israel and Egypt are America’s largest recipients of foreign aid. Why should Americans want to spend their tax dollars supporting Israel and bribing the Egyptians into accepting peace on a continuous basis? Of what value is Israel to the U.S.? And if supporting Israel is such a great idea, how come the Europeans don’t do it?
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What then has Israel done for the U.S.? The only concrete benefit that the State of Israel has provided to the United States is the absorption of millions of Jewish refugees from Europe, Arab countries, the former Soviet Union, and miscellaneous states such as Ethiopia. Most of these Jews would have preferred to live in the United States and in fact applied for admission to the U.S. We were able to turn down their applications for immigration in good conscience. As long as the State of Israel exists, which grants automatic citizenship to any Jew who shows up, we can turn Jews away from our borders without risk of an embarrassing mass killing.
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If the Arabs were to conquer Israel and fail to kill all of its citizens, there is a high probability that the Jewish survivors of that war would wash up on American shores. How happy would the the average American gentile be to live alongside Russian and Middle Eastern Jews who don’t share his culture, language, and values? … Rather than get into a national debate on whether more Jews can be tolerated on our shores, we send money and weapons to the Israelis. Imagine that you had a fat drunk cousin named Earl living in a trailer park in Louisiana. Would you rather send $250 every month to keep him in beer and pork rinds down there or let him come up and move into your guest room? … Israel has no practical value for the nations of Continental Europe. The surviving descendant’s of Germany’s 500,000 pre-war Jews are not going to attempt to return to Berlin. Jews who escaped from Morocco with the clothes on their back are not going to want to try their luck in Poland.

They’re spreading poison about American Jews.

Many of the people spreading this poison are Jews themselves, a relatively small group that wants to convince everybody (or at least everybody in power) that the great bulk of us think the way they do, which we don’t. Some non-Jews, like Pat Buchanan and other less-rabid but no less invidious bigots, but find it a good way to stereotype us: Jews all think alike, dontcha know. It’s weird and freaky when militant right-wing Jews can hook up with old-fashioned anti-Semites to stereotype the rest of us, but these are weird and freaky times.
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More and more I hear that those militaristic Jews in and advising the Bush administration–such as Paul Wolfowitz inside the White House and William Kristol on the outside–prove where Jews are at, politically. Nonsense. That only proves what political stripe of Jews are in favor in the Bush White House.

Wolfowitz and Kristol are Americans who are Jewish and who are part of the American Conservative Right. Why single them out as Jews and then blame the rest of us Jews for them? Most of us don’t like or agree with those ideologues either. Blaming the rest of us for them is like blaming the Methodists for Dick Cheney or Baptists for John Ashcroft.