Tag Archives: Glenn Beck

“Where’s the rest of me?”

Ronald Reagan the actor once famously screamed on screen "Where’s the rest of me?!" after waking in a hospital to discover that a sadistic surgeon had amputated both of his legs.  My guess is that Ronald Reagan the national leader would express similar horror at what is happening to his beloved conservative movement as some in its ranks seek to sever from its agenda the priority "the Gipper" consistently gave to the national security.

One need look no further than the various functions held in the Washington area last week to see why Mr. Reagan would be so alarmed.  On Wednesday, I joined a group of prominent conservatives assembled for the purpose of unveiling a document dubbed "the Mount Vernon Statement."  It was intended to emulate an earlier articulation of the principles that unite the Right, issued fifty years ago at the Sharon, Connecticut home of William F. Buckley, Jr.

It was noteworthy that, during the press event where the new statement was released, Colin Hanna of the remarkable organization Let Freedom Ring read passages from the previous one.  The latter spoke of "eternal truths" to be affirmed, including: "That we will be free only so long as the national sovereignty of the United States is secure; that history shows periods of freedom are rare, and can exist only when free citizens concertedly defend their rights against all enemies; that the forces of international Communism are, at present, the greatest single threat to these liberties; that the United States should stress victory over, rather than co-existance with, this menace; and that American foreign policy must be judged by this criterion: Does it serve the just interests of the United States?"

By contrast, the Mt. Vernon document made no mention at all of today’s totalitarian ideology – what authoritative Islam calls Shariah – or the threat it poses to America, let alone declare that victory should be our purpose in dealing with this menace.  To be sure, there were passing references to the Founders’ "secur[ing] national independence," "warnings to tyrants and despots everywhere" and the proposition that "energetic but responsible government is the key to America’s safety and leadership role in the world."  Thin gruel by comparison with Sharon’s statement, and woefully short of the sort of express commitment to "peace through strength" Mr. Reagan exemplified and practiced.

Still, the Mount Vernon Statement is a paragon of robust national security- mindedness in contrast to what took place in the succeeding three days at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).  With a few notable exceptions – including powerful addresses by former UN Ambassador John Bolton and former Senator Rick Santorum – the program was bereft of the focus one would think 10,000 people who cherish the memory of Ronald Reagan would have demanded, especially in the midst of a global war with two active combat fronts.

Incredibly, there was but one panel held in the plenary hall that had as its principal subject the question of national defense.  Entitled "What is a Conservative Foreign Policy?," it featured remarks by: a junior (but promising) Member of Congress, Rep. Jason Chaffetz of Utah; an old Reaganaut, Don Devine, who urged America to emulate President Reagan’s abandoning of Lebanon and the use of force only in tiny Grenada; and Joanne Herring, the colorful Texas patriot/philanthropist best known for her persona played by Julia Roberts in "Charlie Wilson’s War."

With all due respect to the participants, it is inconceivable that CPAC’s organizers could not have arranged a more formidable program to address this and related topics.  We are entitled to know why they did not do so.  Watch this space for the answer.

Whatever the reason, the intended take-away from most of the other major speakers– including Glenn Beck, who closed the conference with an extraordinary, hour-plus-long "pox on both your houses" call-to-action that never once mentioned national security– and the featured panels was unmistakable:  It’s the economy, stupid.  Or at least, it’s the deficit, or excessive government spending or just excessive government.

As a result, it came as little surprise to this attendee that libertarian Rep. Ron Paul won 31% of the vote in the CPAC straw poll.  In the absence of the sort of serious attention to national security that was emblematic of the conservatism of Bill Buckley and Ronald Reagan, why shouldn’t those present feel free blithely to endorse a man who is committed to small, cheap government even if his positions on foreign and defense policy are so extreme and so critical of America as to make Barack Obama’s look responsible, if not hardline.

And there’s the rub. Even if a robust security policy platform were not, on the merits, the right stance for the Right, it has proven repeatedly to be the winning-est stance politically, especially in times when our countrymen properly feel insecure.  Sen. Scott Brown of Massachusetts was wildly acclaimed by the CPAC masses, yet he would be the first to acknowledge that some 64% of his voters supported him because of his rejection of Obama’s fecklessness on terrorism. 

In time of war, the American people deserve at least one party/movement/team that is unabashedly Reaganesque in its commitment to the national security of the United States.  If conservatives and Republicans fail to articulate and demonstrate such a commitment, it is a safe bet that – even in an election season seemingly so promising –  they will wake up on November 3rd screaming, "Where’s the rest of me?"

 

Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. is President of the Center for Security Policy, a columnist for the Washington Times and host of the nationally syndicated program, "Secure Freedom Radio."

 

Whither American Jewry?

During a recent speaking tour in Canada, MK Nahman Shai (Kadima) shocked some of his hosts when he said that his primary goal in politics today is to bring down the Netanyahu government. Although indelicate, Shai’s comment was not surprising. Kadima is in the opposition. And like all opposition parties in all parliamentary democracies, the primary goal of its members is to bring down the government so that they can take power.

Given that this is the case, it is unsurprising that until this week, Kadima leader Tzipi Livni tried to blame Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu for US President Barack Obama’s hostility towards Israel. Far more newsworthy than her criticism of Netanyahu was her public rebuke of Obama this week for his attempt to strong-arm Israel into barring Jewish construction in Jerusalem’s Gilo neighborhood.

On Wednesday Livni said, "Gilo is part of the Israeli consensus… and it is important to understand this for all discussions of borders in any future agreement."

Indeed. There is an Israeli consensus. The Israeli consensus regarding Jerusalem is based among other things on the understanding that no nation can give up its capital city and survive.

Livni wants to be prime minister one day. For that to happen, Israel must survive until she wins an election. And Israel will not long survive if it surrenders its right to its capital.

One might have thought that American Jews could be counted on to stand by Israel on this issue. But then, one would be wrong.

FOR THE past six years, Republican Senator Sam Brownback has repeatedly submitted a bill to the US Senate that, if passed into law, would revoke the presidential waiver that has allowed successive presidents to refuse to implement the 1995 law requiring the State Department to move the US Embassy to Jerusalem. This year Brownback co-sponsored his bill with Independent Senator Joseph Lieberman. As luck would have it, the Brownback-Lieberman bill was submitted two weeks before Obama launched his latest campaign against Jewish building in Jerusalem.

In the 1980s and 1990s, American Jews lobbied hard to get the embassy moved to Jerusalem. But now some American Jewish leaders recoil at the very notion. In response to the Brownback-Lieberman Jerusalem Embassy Relocation Act of 2009, the Kansas City Jewish Chronicle published an editorial last Friday titled, "Bad move, Senator Brownback."

The newspaper’s editors condemned their retiring senator and called his bill, "a cheap, grandstanding move by a conservative Republican on his way out the door, playing to Jews and Christian Zionists while trying to throw a monkey wrench into President Obama’s diplomatic spokes."

According to Sen. Brownback’s office, the paper never had any criticism of the same bill when he submitted it during president George W. Bush’s tenure in office. But now, as Israel’s government and opposition stand shoulder to shoulder protecting Israeli control over Jerusalem from assaults by Obama, Kansas City’s Jewish newspaper’s editorial board willingly bucked what it acknowledged are the wishes of "Jews and Christian Zionists," in order to stand by their man in the Oval Office.

Some of Israel’s most high-profile supporters in the US are conservative talk radio and television hosts like Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck. But rather than thank them for their support, the Anti-Defamation League, which is supposed to be dedicated first and foremost to defending Jews from anti-Semitism, published a special report this week where it insinuated that they cultivate a climate of hatred and paranoia which could endanger Jews among others.

The ADL report, "Rage Grows in America: Anti-Government Conspiracies," dubbed Beck the "fearmonger-in-chief," for his opposition to Obama’s domestic and foreign policies. It similarly castigated the so-called "tea party" movement which has attracted millions of Americans opposed to high taxes, and the townhall meetings this past summer where millions of Americans peacefully argued against Obama’s healthcare policies.

The ADL’s decision to issue a special report attacking Obama’s political opponents and insinuating that Americans who oppose him cultivate an environment in which paranoid and dangerous fringe groups feel comfortable operating is strange given that the ADL never put out a similar report against parallel anti-Bush movements. As Commentary‘s Jonathan Tobin noted this week, the ADL was more likely to see overt and vicious anti-Semitic statements and placards being waved around at anti-Iraq war rallies than at anti-Obama healthcare and tax policy demonstrations.

Ironically, the ADL has a specific institutional interest in combating leftist paranoia. A recent movie attacking the ADL called Defamation, by leftist, anti-Israel Israeli filmmaker Yoav Shamir, is currently hitting the film festival circuit in the US and Europe. A major hit among anti-Israel activists and regular anti-Semites on the Left and Right, Defamation accuses the ADL of exaggerating the Holocaust and anti-Semitism to justify what Shamir views as its nefarious aims. Apparently, tribal loyalty to the Left trumps the institutional interests of the ADL.

It certainly trumps the interests of New York University’s Hillel director Rabbi Yehuda Sarna. As James Taranto reported on Wednesday in The Wall Street Journal, this week Sarna called for NYU’s Jewish community to join NYU Muslims at a rally that both commemorated the massacre at Ft. Hood and denounced NYU professor Tunku Varadarajan for writing a column in Forbes magazine. In his article, Varadarajan committed the crime of stating the obvious fact that Ft. Hood terrorist Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan was motivated by his Islamic beliefs when he shouted Allahu Akbar and shot some 40 people, killing 13.

Given that people and groups like al-Qaida and Hamas that share Hasan’s views assert that all Jews should be killed, it would seem that the good rabbi would not feel the need to attack professors who point out that Hasan’s views are dangerous. But then, it is no longer strange to see Hillels on American university campuses behaving in a manner that is not in line with what might be considered the interests of either the American Jewish community or the Jewish people as a whole.

Take UC Berkeley’s Hillel center, for example. Since Ken Kramarz, Hillel’s regional director for Northern California, started his job in June 2007, Berkeley’s Hillel has adopted a hostile view towards Judaism and Israel. As pro-Israel community activist Natan Nestel notes, in the past year alone, Hillel held a dance party on Yom Hashoah, and it held a Cinco de Mayo barbecue on Remembrance Day for Fallen IDF Soldiers. It has also failed to hold community Seders for the past two years. Instead, last year, its members hung signs in the Hillel building declaring, "Matza sucks."

Beyond its derogatory treatment of Jewish and Israeli holidays, Berkeley’s Hillel has allowed an extremist group called Students for Justice for Palestine to participate in its organizational meetings.

SJP calls for Israel’s destruction through unlimited Arab immigration. It also advocates for UC Berkeley to divest from Israel. Edgar Bronfman, Hillel’s International Chairman, has characterized SJP umbrella organization as "anti-Israel… anti-Semitic [and] alarming…"

No doubt owing in part to Berkeley Hillel’s decision to permit SJP members to spread their propaganda at its organizational meetings, Hillel’s student leaders and members participated in SJP’s Israel Apartheid Week this past March.

The student meeting that SJP participated in at Berkeley’s Hillel was sponsored by a group called "Kesher Enoshi."

This group describes itself as "a progressive Jewish community that engages directly with Israeli civil society. We do this by educating ourselves and others about the day-to-day struggles of people in Israel by making direct connections with human rights/social change organizations in Israel, linking their struggles with those on campus and in the wider community, and building a community of active participants in social change in Israel."

This mission statement, which says nothing about Zionism, sounds an awful lot like the goal of the New Israel Fund. This month, three Arab "civil society" groups supported to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars by the NIF published a poster depicting an IDF soldier touching the breast of an Arab woman with the caption, "Her husband needs a permit to touch her, the occupation penetrates her life every day."

The poster was issued to publicize a conference in Haifa called "My Land, Space, Body and Sexuality: Palestinians in the Shadow of the Wall," whose purpose was to demonize Israel using post-modern jargon.

Unlike Hillel, NIF is widely recognized as a far-left fringe group. But as Arab Israeli NGOs use the dollars of American Jewish NIF donors to advance their "civil society" programs aimed at delegitimizing Israel’s right to exist, the Reform Movement – which is not a fringe group – decided unanimously two weeks ago to criticize and pressure Israel for what its leadership views as Israel’s unfair treatment of its Arab citizens.

As this column goes to press, if its board members don’t cancel their meeting, the San Francisco Jewish Federation will be grudgingly voting on a resolution that would prohibit it from sponsoring events that denigrate or demonize Israel or supporting organizations that partner with organizations that call for divestment, sanctions or boycotts against Israel.

The resolution follows the Jewish Federation of San Francisco’s decision to co-sponsor the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival last summer. That festival featured Shamir’s Defamation, and the egregiously anti-Israel film Rachel, about the late pro-terror activist Rachel Corrie. The film festival was also sponsored by the anti-Zionist Jewish Voices for Peace group, the American Friends Service Committee, which hosted a dinner for Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in New York last year, the Rachel Corrie Foundation and other radical anti-Israel groups.

If the vote takes place, it will be a great victory for a small group of local Jewish activists. These individual Jews have banded together because they are deeply disturbed by the federation’s willingness to use community funds to advance events whose basic message is that Israel should be destroyed.

KADIMA’S INTERESTS as a political party place it at loggerheads with the government on almost every issue. But its leaders this week were rational enough to recognize that they must support Israel’s sovereign rights in Jerusalem despite the fact that doing so placed it on the government’s side. Their display of sanity is a clear indication that Israeli society today is healthy and capable of meeting the challenges it faces.

It is clear that most American Jews believe that it is in their interests to support the Democratic Party and the Left. But like the anti-establishment Jewish activists in San Francisco, American Jews ought to realize that on issues like Israel’s survival and their own survival as Jews they ought to stand by their interests even when they seem to clash with their leftist and Democratic loyalties. And they ought to stand by their friends on these issues, even when their friends are conservative Republicans.

It can only be hoped that the San Francisco pro-Israel upstarts’ campaign against the federation was successful yesterday. Then, too, if the American Jewish community is to long survive, these San Francisco Jewish activists’ demand that their community support Israel’s right to exist must be joined by their fellow American Jews throughout the country.

Free speech, but not for me?

Paul Krugman’s outrage is selective and aimed, as usual, at conservatives.

I was surprised to see the New York Times columnist take a swipe at me and the paper that has long been my home. Since Frank Rich, another New York Times columnist, and numerous bloggers have all written essentially the same thing as Mr. Krugman, it is obvious that a new line of attack against conservatives is emerging. It needs to be stopped in its tracks.

In a column called "The Big Hate," Mr. Krugman seized upon two unrelated shootings in different cities – of a Kansas abortionist and a U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum guard in Washington – to contend outrageously that disaffected conservatives and Iraq war veterans may pose a public threat.

Mr. Krugman faulted the leading lights of the conservative media for fostering a climate of alienation and anger. He castigated Fox News hosts Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck, charging them with "mainstreaming right-wing extremism." Talk radio’s Rush Limbaugh "peddles conspiracy theories" on Planet Krugman.

To this list of alleged extremist-enablers, Mr. Krugman added The Washington Times, noting that it "saw fit to run an opinion piece declaring that President Obama not only identifies with Muslims, but actually may still be one himself and that in any case he has ‘aligned himself’ with the radical Muslim Brotherhood." The unnamed author was yours truly.

Let me be clear. The nature and religious context of Mr. Obama’s relationship with his Creator is, as far as I am concerned, the man’s own business. Religious tests for holding public office in this country went out around the time of the Salem witch trials, and I don’t want them to come back.

Mr. Obama’s policies, however, are fair game for criticism. If the president singles out for special treatment any faith or seeks, whether wittingly or not, to advance the agenda of its most intolerant practitioners, that is decidedly our business.

Indeed, one would think Mr. Krugman and his friends would be the first to defend the rights of such critics. After all, Mr. Krugman’s cohorts on the left and its media echo chamber endlessly assailed President George W. Bush’s policies. They also routinely engaged in the most aggressive and inflammatory personal attacks on the president and his subordinates. Remember "Bush lied; people died"? Charging a chief executive with deliberately prevaricating and, consequently, with responsibility for the deaths of untold numbers of innocents surely would qualify as the mainstreaming of left-wing extremist views.

Where, for that matter, is Mr. Krugman’s outrage about the fact that MSNBC has made a cottage industry of hiring virulent Bush-haters and promoting their conspiracy theories about Mr. Bush’s imperial and unconstitutional ambitions? How about the prevailing Hollywood meme that our 43rd president was a fascist guilty of war crimes – in comparison with which actor Jon Voight’s contention that Mr. Obama is a "false prophet," which merited a Krugman denunciation, is pretty tame stuff. Did Mr. Krugman ever object to the "opinion pieces" of his New York Times colleague Maureen Dowd, whose serial character assassinations of senior U.S. officials would, by any objective measure, be examples of, in his words, "the media establishment joining hands with the lunatic fringe"?

In addition to selective outrage, Mr. Krugman is given to selective quotation. He ignores the evidence I cite showing an uncanny similarity between some of the language and policies of the president and of Muslim Brotherhood.

In my column, I identified a number of instances in which Mr. Obama’s policies track with this agenda. These include his promise in his Cairo speech to "fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear"; to ensure that Muslim women in America can cover their heads, including, presumably, when they are having their photographs taken for driver’s licenses; and to permit the Muslim practice of tithing known as zakat, even though Islamic "charities" have been convicted of using this practice as a cover for money-laundering and material support for terrorism.

Islamists are thrilled by the president’s "tough love" campaign against Israel. They have every reason to believe the concessions now being demanded of the Jewish state will no more require Arab reciprocity in the future than has been the case in the past.

One could add to this worrying list Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.’s announcement following the president’s Cairo speech. Mr. Holder promised "a return to robust civil rights enforcement and outreach in defending religious freedoms," with a view to "using criminal and civil rights laws to protect Muslim Americans." Radical Muslims have proved adept at using such rights to thwart legitimate surveillance and other countermeasures by law enforcement.

It is not extremism to observe that these Obama initiatives could have very far-reaching and negative implications for the United States, its society and security. It is extremism to hold that all critics of the president should be shunned into silence.

Frank J. Gaffney Jr. is president of the Center for Security Policy and the host of the syndicated program "Secure Freedom Radio" heard in Washington weeknights on WTNT.