Anti-Israel mentality in Democrats and others

by oldschooltwentysix

A view held by most at this site is that an anti-Israel mentality has occupied a disproportionate space in the Democratic Party, especially among progressive activists and filtered down to those that follow Democratic politics. Others scoff at the notion. It is just the fringe, they say, not the "mainstream" Democrats.

Here is more fodder in the matter. Back in 2003, current State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf wrote a college honors thesis entitled, The Religious Right in American Support for Israel. According to her former professor, it was about how conservative evangelical support for Israel complicates U.S. foreign policy.

The theme about how evangelicals really don't care about Israel is a tired one that loyal progressives like to trot out whenever pro-Israel Christians enter the fray. As if these people did not think that Israel and America are siblings in shared values. Or that Israel is good for American security and profits the world. These people are not killing Jews, either, or creating so much of the violence we see today, despite their "ulterior" motives.

We should not forget that they are social conservatives, however, which to many Democrats translates into bad people. They are despised by some, even more than Netanyahu!

Can one be more mainstream Democrat than Ms. Harf? If only the evangelicals would tell the truth about their intentions, then Israel would have less support and U.S. foreign policy toward Israel would be less complicated. The argument that this is just a fringe seems weakened.

But there is more concerning the anti-Israel mentality. Harf has a journalistic background, too. She wrote for the Indiana Daily Student and then became a media spokesperson for the CIA before the State Department, and says her training has helped her to deal with the press.

Often there is a confluence in the anti-Israel mentality between progressive Democrats and journalists. This is not surprising. They run in the same circles, along with many in academia. And it allows an opportunity to include the video of Matti Friedman's excellent speech in the UK to BICOM on January 26. The text is here.

How well Friedman describes those journalists and others, like Ms. Harf, that have been informed in such a way that they stress jobs for Jew hating terrorists and believe if only Israel would go away, so would most all these problems.

Ironically, while evangelicals pray for the end of Israel, others actually work to bring that end.



A surreal mentality that uses Israel, the only Jewish state, as the fulcrum of an immoral world is immoral itself, especially when one considers the treatment of the Jewish people by the non-Jewish world, and that Israel is among the best places in treating minorities. The disparate treatment in other contexts would be called illegal discrimination. Until this mentality is repudiated, there will be little actual progress. These purveyors will keep making the same mistakes, driven by their prejudice, then wonder why hate and violence persists.