Phony Outrage, Phony Politics

Last week Democrats were supposedly outraged by Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki's refusal to condemn Hizbullah and condemnation of Israel. Howard Dean called him an Anti-Semite. Senator Barbara Boxer and Charles Schumer boycotted his speech. Then of course Dick Durbin just had to join in the fun.

Now I have no doubt that as a Shiite with close ties to the Iraqi Ayatollah, Maliki's views on Jews are pretty much what they are across the Arab world where the median range is between those who want to kill Jews now and those who want to kill Jews later. That doesn't mean the born again Pro-Israel Democrats are anything but laughable.

"We don't need to spend $200, $300, $500 billion bringing democracy to Iraq to turn it over to people who believe Israel doesn't have a right to defend itself and refuse to condemn Hezbollah," Howard Dean said.

This pretty much categorizes the Clinton administration, certainly the Carter one. They certainly never believed Israel had a right to defend itself and repeatedly refused to condemn Palestinian terrorists. The only reason Democrats are doing this is to create a split between Jews and the Bush Administration before the elections and embarass the Bush Administration with an impossible choice as well as finding a new angle attacking the War in Iraq.

Even as the Democrats play the same tune that the solution to the conflict is for the US to "leverage its prestige and resources to achieve a final settlement and peace in the middle east," translation, "pressure Israel for more concessions to the terrorists" they try to out-hawk the Bush administration on Israel, a laughable enterprise. The Republicans at least occasionally comprehend that Israel needs to defend itself, the only time the Democrats do is when they want to poke a stick in the Republican's eyes and score some political points.

Now of course on Israel 90 percent of the time the Republicans talk like Ronald Reagan and act like Jimmy Carter. The Democrats talk like Reagan on Israel only when it's election time. Reagan meanwhile talked like Reagan but wound up acting like Carter a lot of the time too, trading arms for hostages and bullying Begin to get out of Lebanon comparing Israel's bombing to the Holocaust.

The real moral may be that 90 percent of politicians will set out Israel in the hopes of scoring points with the Arab world and pander to Jewish voters during election time and the occasional AIPAC dinner. Jews of course, like lonely spinters, seem pathetically eager to hear how politicians love us. Conservative and liberal Jews hold up the speeches of Republican and Democratic politicians as proof of how much they love us. They point to voting records full of meaningless votes intended to be cancelled out by Presidential fiat. They ignore the simple fact that American politics like British colonial politics is geared towards an Arab Middle-East in which a Jewish Israel is an occasional strategic and commercial ally but mostly a nuisance that alienates those Arab nations they're trying to woo.

For half a century the diplomatic Romeos of the Western world have waited beneath the balconies of Arabia reciting protestations of their love to their veiled duplicitious Juliets. And though they continue to be spurned, they continue to pursue that impossible romance. Like Truman they may tell the Jews what we want to hear, but it's to Saudi Arabia, Quatar and Egypt, that they're actually true. Will it all end in mutual suicide here as well as the Western World chokes on the Islamic threat it determinedly whitewashes and ignores while the Islamic world melts down into a frenzy of madness hate.

Who is to know. Who is to say.