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Barry Rubin

Are liberals right that Israel is losing support?

After all, these people have a choice regarding how to respond to the situation:

Option 1: Israel is at fault for losing the Obama cult crowd and a small but vocal increasingly left-wing sector of Americans (many of whom aren’t that thrilled with the United States either) because of something that it has done.

If only Israel would show itself ready to take risks for peace, elect a prime minister who was ready to recognize a Palestinian state and give up almost all of the territory captured in 1967, show the Palestinians that Israelis aren’t horrible monsters, let Palestinians rule the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, help them get billions of dollars in aid and let them create the own armed force to stop the real extremists, then peace is possible! Oh, wait a minute, that already happened.

And there were three such prime ministers: Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres and Ehud Barak.

Option 2: Given an increasingly left-wing ideology that’s based on faulty assumptions and neglects the dangerous radicalism of Islamist forces and other enemies of America, it is the dominant worldview in the mass media, academia and ruling circles in America that is to blame for turning away from Israel.

Understand this well: Option 1 requires Israel to change; Option 2 requires the people voicing such complaints about Israel to change.

Well, these people don’t want to exa

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When isn’t the left on the wrong side and with the mass murderers? Even Hitler was merely the flip side of the left.

Blake on January 7, 2013 at 9:48 PM

Blake on January 7, 2013 at 9:48 PM

Hitler was on the Left. The name of the Nazi party included the word socialist.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/nazi

a member of the National Socialist German Workers’ party of Germany

Thomas Sowell:

One of the reasons why both pro-Obama and anti-Obama observers may be reluctant to see him as fascist is that both tend to accept the prevailing notion that fascism is on the political right, while it is obvious that Obama is on the political left.

Back in the 1920s, however, when fascism was a new political development, it was widely — and correctly — regarded as being on the political left. Jonah Goldberg’s great book “Liberal Fascism” cites overwhelming evidence of the fascists’ consistent pursuit of the goals of the left, and of the left’s embrace of the fascists as one of their own during the 1920s.

Mussolini, the originator of fascism, was lionized by the left, both in Europe and in America, during the 1920s. Even Hitler, who adopted fascist ideas in the 1920s, was seen by some, including W.E.B. Du Bois, as a man of the left.

It was in the 1930s, when ugly internal and international actions by Hitler and Mussolini repelled the world, that the left distanced themselves from fascism and its Nazi offshoot — and verbally transferred these totalitarian dictatorships to the right, saddling their opponents with these pariahs.

INC on January 7, 2013 at 10:03 PM

The question is, “why” do liberals want Israel to have less support. Liberal Jews in American that are enabling harm to Israel are no better than brown shirts.

smoothsailing on January 7, 2013 at 10:48 PM

I might have missed that conference where all liberals gathered and declared what Rubin claims they did. Funny that he bases his whole article on a premise that he actually rushes over like this:

there are many examples so you can insert your own

Step 1: Imagine some bs.
Step 2: Rabble unendingly about bs.
Step 3: Profit!

lester on January 7, 2013 at 10:56 PM

One can hope.

libfreeordie on January 7, 2013 at 11:01 PM

lester on January 7, 2013 at 10:56 PM

Whew, I’m glad we have a liberal that supports Israel. You do after your comment, right?

smoothsailing on January 7, 2013 at 11:02 PM

One can hope.

libfreeordie on January 7, 2013 at 11:01 PM

Laughing my f*cking ass off. You were saying Lester?

smoothsailing on January 7, 2013 at 11:04 PM

INC on January 7, 2013 at 10:03 PM

Hitler was a fascist. He slapped socialist to the name of the party to attract more nuts and to distinguish it from any capitalist ideology which Hitler disdained.

Blake on January 7, 2013 at 11:10 PM

Lester, your very liberal troll thread buddy agrees that we should hope for support of Israel to wane. What say you, you old Israel supporter you? Do you think his comment is in opposition to real liberals? You were saying, in so many words, this Rubin notion is BS.

What say you, Lester?

smoothsailing on January 7, 2013 at 11:13 PM

Come on trolls. No need to hide your feelings now. Its safe to hate Israel.

smoothsailing on January 7, 2013 at 11:21 PM

American Jews came from populations that were heavily courted by Lenin, but for one reason or another, ended up a whole ocean away when the Iron Curtain finally fell. They never got that full, “Lenin is succeeded by Stalin, who had that Doctor’s Plot thing going, and closed the Jewish Autonomous Enclave, which they put in friggin’ SIBERIA”experience. Their fond rememberances of Communists in Russia were somewhat like lovable Perchik in Fiddler on the Roof.

Jews in Israel and Europe got the full measure. Israel was originally settled by leftist Jews who GTFO of Eastern Europe before they had the full Communist experience. But Soviet support of the Palestinians, plus the arrival of populations who didn’t escape Eastern Europe unscathed, plus the lack of success in the kibbutzim, changed many Israeli Jews’ minds about the wonders of Socialism.

Sekhmet on January 8, 2013 at 12:25 AM