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Caroline Glick writes on Tom Friedman.
New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman balanced his substantively anti-Israel positions with repeated protestations of love for Israel.
His balancing act ended last week when he employed traditional anti-Semitic slurs to dismiss the authenticity of substantive American support for Israel.
Channeling the longstanding anti-Semitic charge that Jewish money buys support for power-hungry Jews best expressed in the forged 19th century Protocols of the Elders of Zion and in John Mearshimer’s and Stephen Walt’s 2007 book The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy, Friedman denied the significance of the US Congress’s overwhelming support for Israel.
As he put it, “I sure hope that Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, understands that the standing ovation he got in Congress this year was not for his politics. That ovation was bought and paid for by the Israel lobby.”
It would be nice if Friedman is forced to pay some sort of price for finally coming out of the closet as a dyed-in-the-wool Israel hater. But he probably won’t. As he made clear in his column, he isn’t writing for the general public, but for a very small, select group of elitist leftists. These are the only people who matter to Friedman. And they matter to him because they share his opinions and his goal of indoctrinating young people to adopt his pathologically hostile views about Israel and his contempt for the American public that supports it.
It doesn’t matter to Friedman that overwhelming survey evidence, amassed over decades, show that the vast majority of the American public and the American Jewish community support Israel. It doesn’t matter to him that the support shown to Netanyahu in Congress last May was a reflection of that support.
As he put it, “The real test is what would happen if Bibi tried to speak at, let’s say, the University of Wisconsin. My guess is that many students would boycott him and many Jewish students would stay away.”
Embedded in this statement are two key points. First, Friedman assesses that the prevailing view on US college campuses are his own radical views. And he is convinced that college students share his views. …
… On December 7 Politico’s Ben Smith published a detailed report about how two of the Democratic Party’s core institutions, the Center for American Progress and Media Matters are waging a concerted, continuous campaign to diminish left wing Democratic support for Israel. Media Matters official M.J. Rosenberg acknowledged that given the depth of popular support for Israel in the US, chances are remote that their efforts will pay off in Congress today. He explained that his goal is to shift the Democratic Party’s position on Israel through its younger generation.
As he put it, “We’re playing the long game here.”
Happily, to date, they are losing the long game as well as the short game both in Israel and the US. While it is important to remain on guard against radicals like Friedman and Rosenberg and their fellow travelers on campuses, it is also important to recognize that despite their powerful positions, they remain marginal voices in both Israel and the US.
Six and a half years ago George Bush spoke the truth about North Korea. Christopher Hitchens paid tribute to him in a May 2005 column for Slate.
How extraordinary it is, when you give it a moment’s thought, that it was only last week that an American president officially spoke the obvious truth about North Korea. In point of fact, Mr. Bush rather understated matters when he said that Kim Jong-il’s government runs “concentration camps.” It would be truer to say that the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea, as it calls itself, is a concentration camp. It would be even more accurate to say, in American idiom, that North Korea is a slave state.
This way of phrasing it would not have the legal implication that the use of the word “genocide” has. To call a set of actions “genocidal,” as in the case of Darfur, is to invoke legal consequences that are entailed by the U.N.’s genocide convention, to which we are signatories. However, to call a country a slave state is to set another process in motion: that strange business that we might call the working of the American conscience.
It was rhetorically possible, in past epochs of ideological confrontation, for politicians to shout about the “slavery” of Nazism and of communism, and indeed of nations that were themselves “captive.” The element of exaggeration was pardonable, in that both systems used forced labor and also the threat of forced labor to coerce or to terrify others. But not even in the lowest moments of the Third Reich, or of the gulag, or of Mao’s “Great Leap Forward,” was there a time when all the subjects of the system were actually enslaved.
In North Korea, every person is property and is owned by a small and mad family with hereditary power. …
James Pethokoukis wonders what a Korean unification might cost.
The death of Kim Jong-il, the monstrous, madman dictator of hostage nation North Korea, creates tremendous uncertainty and risk for the region. Yet one scenario, however optimistic, would be that somehow this event puts North and South on the road to reunification. What might that cost? Well, Germany has paid some $2 trillion over two decades to reunify East and West. But keep in mind that East Germany was only a fourth the size of North Korea. And much richer, relatively. In 1989, East German per capita income was a third of the West’s. The situation in Korea is much different, as this analysis from the Atlantic Council sums up: …
Nile Gardiner writes on the president’s $4,000,000 Christmas vacation.
Around $4 million (£2.6 million) – the expected total cost to the US taxpayer of the Obama Christmas family vacation to Hawaii according to the Hawaii Reporter (hat tip: Rob Bluey at The Foundry). This is an astonishing amount of public money to be spending in an age of austerity – when the president is supposed to be leading efforts to cut the US budget deficit, the largest since World War Two, and a towering $15 trillion national debt:
Hawaii Reporter research shows the total cost for the President’s visit for taxpayers far exceeded $1.5 million in 2010 – but is even more costly this year because he extended his vacation by three days and the cost for Air Force One travel has jumped since last assessed in 2000. In addition, Hawaii Reporter was able to obtain more specifics about the executive expenditures.
The total cost (based on what is known) for the 17-day vacation roundtrip vacation to Hawaii for the President, his family and staff has climbed to more than $4 million.
This $4 million figure is nearly 100 times the average annual salary of an American worker, which currently stands at $41,673. The Hawaii Reporter calculates that travel costs alone for the president and his entourage via Air Force One (plus a separate trip for Michelle Obama who has traveled in advance), in addition to a United States Air Force C-17 cargo aircraft to transport “the presidential limos, helicopters and other support equipment”, amounts to a whopping $3,629,622. Housing for security staff costs an estimated $151,200, and luxurious hotel rooms for the president’s 24-strong staff a further $72,216. Based on these figures the total cost to the federal US taxpayer (and the additional burden on the national debt) is a staggering $3,853,038. If you add in local taxpayer costs of $260,000 (including police overtime and city ambulances), the total public expense is $4,113,038. …
Andrew Malcolm has late night humor.
Conan: Newt Gingrich has issued a statement promising that he will not cheat on his wife. Even better, he said he wouldn’t cheat on his next wife either.
Leno: Obama says he didn’t know how bad the economy was when he took office. If it doesn’t improve soon, the next president will be saying the same thing.