Bill Clinton in his two successful races for the White House in 1992 and 1996 won overwhelming majorities among Jewish voters, with margins not seen since the election of Lyndon B. Johnson over Barry Goldwater in 1964 or of Franklin Delano Roosevelt to his third and fourth terms in 1940 and 1944. Since 1992, the Jewish vote has slowly become more competitive between the two major parties, approaching a 2/3 versus 1/3 split between Democrats and Republicans. The 2016 presidential race is likely to offer a choice between Hillary Clinton, who does not appear to have the same tight hold over Jewish voters that her husband did, and a Republican with far stronger pro-Israel credentials.
The early debates and campaigns for the nomination in both parties have been revealing for the issues that seem to matter to partisans on each side, and those that do not. With regard to United States relations with Israel, the topic has been almost entirely absent from discussion on the Democratic side. Democrats, and especially those on the Left who increasingly dominate the Democratic Party, are far less supportive of Israel or strong American-Israel ties than previous generations of Democratic presidents or leaders — such as Harry Truman, Lyndon B. Johnson, Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, Hubert Humphrey, Bill Clinton and Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan.
America is large and diverse. So it is risky to draw conclusions based on local samples. Nevertheless, a recent conversation with the chair of one of Old Lyme’s two political parties was of interest. Each of the two main political parties have roughly 30% of registered voters. Both, however, have been losing members, while the ranks of independents (Unaffiliated, as they are known in Connecticut) have been growing. The latter comprises 40% of the electorate. Nationwide, a 2013 Gallup Poll showed Republicans with 25%, Democrats with 31% and independents with 44%. Twenty-five years ago, those numbers were, respectively, 31%, 36% and 33%. While this is not a tsunami, it is a trend.
There are myriad reasons for this shift, including a decline in the homogenous nature of our culture to less parental influence and, importantly, a decline in community social groups that once helped bind us. Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam in his book, Bowling Alone, wrote of the decline in civic and community service organizations fifteen years ago. Last year the federal government sponsored a study by the Corporation for National & Community Service that identified falling rates of volunteerism. Another study by USA Today showed similar trends among college graduates. The void created by the loss of volunteers has been filled by government employees. More government workers mean increased government spending. Gerrymandering has meant less competition between parties and more among inter-party factions. The result: more people feel isolated from a expanding sense of extremism in both parties.
“Even if Israel shrank to one downtown city block in Tel Aviv, the Arab and Muslim world would still not recognize a Jewish state or agree to live with it in peace and harmony.”
“Much of the Islamic world now feels empowered, as perhaps never before, to seek global domination. This is the tangible and growing threat to the world; not global warming.”
“What we have witnessed for far too long are Israeli leaders constantly making endless concession to the deceitful leaders of the terrorist crime family known as the Palestinian Authority.”
In 2008 I wrote an article titled: “Forget Waiting for Peace.”
It is heartbreaking to look back now, in this year 2015, at what I feared would unfold for Israel those seven long years ago.
The reality of what I have been writing and warning about for so long is now even more stark today as Muslim Arabs, those who call themselves Palestinians, gleefully engage in an orgy of hate and murder against their Jewish victims throughout the towns and villages of Israel.
Israel’s internal security services, the Shin Bet, said earlier this month that the Palestinian militant group Hamas is among the key drivers of the violence raging in the West Bank and Jerusalem. The group’s leader, Ismail Haniyeh, has called for an intifada, or uprising. Yet, he hasn’t unleashed Hamas’ huge arsenal of rockets or its trained fighting forces from the Gaza Strip, the territory he controls. Hamas has one foot in the uprising and one foot out.
Gaza has hardly been calm. Clashes along the border between Gaza and Israel have been happening daily, with breaches prompting the Israel Defense Forces to fire on the crowd. But, as Israeli journalist Amos Harel points out, Palestinian Islamic Jihad – the smaller Iran-backed militant group – was believed to be behind the border incidents, while Gaza’s Salafi groups that have been firing the rockets.
From an esteemed e-pal….”Daniel Gordis is a left-of-center Israeli who made Aliyah about 20 years ago. This article represents, among other things, a clear sign that despite fractious Israeli politics, an increasing proportion of the Israeli spectrum understands that peace cannot be made with the Palestinians until they accept the existence of a Jewish state. They do not currently accept a Jewish state in any borders. They teach their little kids Jew-hatred, and barbarism emerges from their population at the slightest pretext, or doesn’t need any pretext at all.A key fact in the long-term struggle is that the Palestinians currently feel encouraged in their war because the Europeans now have anti-Semitism seeping out of their pores. It was suppressed for some years after WWII, but it is impossible to suppress forever something so deeply engrained as European anti-Semitism (masquerading, not successfully, as anti-Zionism). But the most important key fact is that Obama’s hostility toward Israel (masquerading as Bibi-hatred) gives “permission” to the Europeans to give vent to how they really feel, and gives encouragement to the Palestinians that a crack has opened in the support of Israel by America. ”
Can they live together?
We have a young language instructor at Shalem College in Jerusalem, where I work. She’s a religious Muslim who wears a hijab, lives in one of the Arab neighborhoods of Jerusalem and is a graduate student at Hebrew University. She’s fun and warm, and a great teacher — the students like her a lot.
Late last spring, when things here were quiet, some of the students mentioned to the department chair that as much as they’d spoken with her over the past couple of years, they’d never discussed politics. They were curious what someone like her thought about the conflict in this region, especially now that she was teaching at an unabashedly Zionist college, had come to know so many Jewish students and had developed such warm relationships with them. How does someone like her see things here? How did she think we would one day be able to settle this conflict?
“So ask her,” the department chair said. “As long as you speak to her in Arabic (she’s on staff to help our students master the language), you can talk about anything you want.”
They did. They told her that since they’d never discussed the “situation” (as we metaphorically call it here in Israel), they were curious how she thought we might someday resolve it.
“It’s our land,” she responded rather matter-of-factly. Stunned, they weren’t sure that they’d heard her correctly. So they waited. But that was all she had to say.
“It’s our land. You’re just here for now.”
The media judges jihadist savagery as tolerable, but Jewish defensive action as unacceptable.
Some in the chattering class have argued that jihadism is understandable or even the “only option [1]” for supposedly disenfranchised Muslims seeking to overturn the status quo political order in the Middle East. This view evinces a soft bigotry of low expectations.
Conversely, the idea that Israel’s response to jihadism is always and everywhere “disproportionate” – that unless Israel acts in a self-righteously suicidal [2] manner [3] it is in the wrong – evinces a hard bigotry of “high” expectations. I put “high” in parentheses because the idea that sacrificing oneself to one’s enemies is a high and moral standard is among the most perverse and low ideas.
Never has this hard bigotry been better illustrated than in the media coverage [4] in recent weeks of the Third Intifada being perpetrated by Arab jihadists in Israel – an Intifada deemed by some the Obama Intifada [5].
The Secretary of State of the United States traveled to the Muslim country of Jordan to assure its Foreign Minister that Jews would not be praying any more at the holiest site in Judaism.
As Kerry put it, “It is Muslims who pray on the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif and non-Muslims who visit.”
Israel is often accused of apartheid and segregation, but here was the Secretary of State championing both, as long as it was Muslim segregation aimed at Jews. The Temple Mount “Status Quo” worriedly talked about by Kerry and the media as the answer to the recent Muslim stabbing spree is no different than the Muslim ban on Jews entering the Cave of the Patriarchs, where Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are buried, past the seventh step. It rewards Muslim violence by upholding Muslim segregationist racism.
Fantasy Islam: A game in which an audience of non-Muslims wish with all their hearts that Islam was a “Religion of Peace,” and a Muslim strives to fulfill that wish by presenting a personal version of Islam that has little foundation in Islamic Doctrine.
As I have mentioned before, “Fantasy Islam” is a popular game among many non-Muslims and so-called “moderate” or “reformist” Muslims. Reza Aslan appears to be such a Muslim.
Reza Aslan was born in Iran. In 1979, at the age of seven, he and his family fled the Iranian Revolution and came to the United States. At the age of 15 he converted to evangelical Christianity, but later returned to Islam. His website states that he is “an internationally acclaimed writer and scholar of religions.” He is currently a Professor of Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside.
In 2005 Aslan wrote a book titled No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam. The updated edition came out in 2011. This article addresses that updated edition.
It should be noted that in his book Aslan listed The Life of Muhammad and the multi-volume work The History of al-Tabari, as among the books he “consulted.” These are classical works by Muslim scholars and major sources for information about Muhammad and Islam. Aslan even specifically mentions them as among those that have “catalogued” the story of Islam (p. xxiv). Unfortunately, although Aslan claims that he “consulted” them, we will see that he apparently overlooked conflicting information in these works in favor of playing Fantasy Islam.
Death Penalty for Apostasy is “Un-Quranic”
On p. 121 Aslan stated that the death penalty for apostasy was “un-Quranic,” and he stated that nowhere in the Koran “is any earthly punishment prescribed for apostasy.”
“Nam homo proponit, sed Deus disponit,” wrote the medieval cleric Thomas a Kempis. “For man proposes, but God disposes.”
The observation that human intent, however well conceived and deftly pursued, is commonly frustrated, does not require the invoking of God. One can, for example, comprehend the frustrating agent as fate, fortune or simply the exigencies of worldly existence.
But the founders of our republic considered the particular circumstance of people’s aspirations and intent being frustrated by the heavy hand of government, and in addressing this phenomenon they clearly attached importance to invoking God.
In the Declaration of Independence, they assert, of course, “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” They further assert that the proper role of government, indeed the raison d’etre of government, is to secure these God-given rights.
Just as they did after the first Democrat debate, the Public Relations and Marketing Division of the Democrat Party––otherwise known as the mainstream media––fell all over themselves declaring Clinton’s victory over her Democrat rivals and the Republican Party. Ignored were the damning admissions that were revealed, particularly the irrefutable evidence that Clinton knew the Benghazi attack was planned by terrorists and not a spontaneous reaction to what Clinton called “an awful Internet video that we had nothing to do with,” the big lie spun by State and the White House to protect Obama’s campaign for reelection.
So now a full year from November 8, 2016 the Dems have all but anointed Hillary to be our next president, based on this despicable display of mendacity, hauteur, and uncontrolled giggling. If they are right, then this country will have turned a dangerous corner on the road to abandoning our republican heritage of limited government, federalism, and personal freedom.
