Monday, February 27, 2012
I find the whole accusation that AIPAC is "Israeli first" or suffering from "dual loyalty" ridiculous because it always comes from people who don't seem to like America much either. There are people who like both the US and Israel and people who don't like either, but few who like the US and not Israel. Maybe a few ancient paleo-conservatives, such as the throwback Pat Buchanan, but they are indeed relics. It seems obvious to me that Israel and the US are natural allies and they have the same natural enemies.
This doesn't mean that US or Israeli policy makers are always right in deciding what is in their best interests. But haters of Israel rarely or never have the interests of the US at heart. The sympathy of the US left for the Muslim totalitarian right has always seemed baffling to me; I suppose it is just the enemy of my enemy thing. But hopers for Israeli defeat are hardly cheerleaders for America. They hope both fail. Their sympathies lie with various third world dictators and hopeless causes and sometimes oddly enough with the Chinese. Because our public political culture is mostly unwelcoming to anything but the softest left, leftish sympathies emerge like weird, buried psychopathlogies, in slips of the tongue and irrational outbursts. One of which is the simmering hatred for Israel and Jews unwilling to apologize for being such. It follows of course that nothing could be more ironic than various Israel haters accusing anyone of dual loyalty when they are, roughly speaking, the same people who could see our burning towers from our enemies' point of view, even as our brothers and sisters jumped to avoid the flames.