Tuesday, September 23, 2008

Leaving the left

It's been a long time since I linked Caroline Glick, and for some pretty good reasons, but I'm breaking the ban today, for some equally good reasons. In this column, she sums up, in excruciatingly accurate detail, the incredible imbicility of the dis-invitation of Sarah Palin to yesterday's anti-Iran rally in New York, the mindset of Jewish Democrats and the Democratic Party in general. And in so doing, she also sums up something else: the reasons why, after a lifetime of hanging out in those circles, I have ultimately left the left.

American Jews have good reason to be ashamed and angry today. As Iran moves into the final stages of its nuclear weapons development program - nuclear weapons which it will use to destroy the State of Israel, endanger Jews around the world and cow the United States of America - Democratic American Jewish leaders decided that putting Sen. Barack Obama in the White House is more important than protecting the lives of the Jewish people in Israel and around the world.

On Monday, the New York Sun published the speech that Republican vice presidential nominee and Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin would have delivered at that day's rally outside UN headquarters in New York against Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and against Iran's plan to destroy Israel. She would have delivered it, if she hadn't been disinvited.

[ ... ]

The lives of 6 million Jews in Israel are today tied to the fortunes of those [Iranian] women, to the fortunes of American forces in Iraq, to the willingness of Americans across the political and ideological spectrum to recognize that there is more that unifies them than divides them and to act on that knowledge to defeat the forces of genocide, oppression, hatred and destruction that are led today by the Iranian regime and personified in the brutal personality of Ahmadinejad. But Jewish Democrats chose to ignore this basic truth in order to silence Palin.

They should be ashamed. The Democratic Party should be ashamed. And Jewish American voters should consider carefully whether opposing a woman who opposes the abortion of fetuses is really more important than standing up for the right of already born Jews to continue to live and for the Jewish state to continue to exist. Because this week it came to that.

Please read every word. That's only the beginning and the end. There's so much more in between.

And if you haven't yet read the text of Palin's intended speech, please do that too.