By Donald H. Harrison
SAN DIEGO–When I wrote my editorial reluctantly endorsing Mitt Romney, I anticipated that there would be many people who would disagree with me. I had such a difficult time deciding the right course of action, it was only natural that other people pondering the election could reach different conclusions.
Some supporters of President Obama stated their conclusions civilly, while others used the occasion to vent some of their frustration and spleen. Par for the course. Internet communication often fails to bring out the best in letter writers.
A recurring theme from some of my detractors was that to consider the plight of Israel in deciding how to vote is somehow disloyal or un-American. According to these writers, Israel is just one issue and, from their perspective, a fairly minor one, considering the panoply of economic and social issues facing this country.
I don’t think that these letter writers have carefully considered the words and actions of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the ayotollahs, who are hell-bent on obtaining and using a nuclear bomb. Nor have these critics learned the awful lesson of history.
In the course of every-day politics, Holocaust analogies are inappropriate. They trivialize the horrible mass murders that befell the Jews and other peoples. However, when we talk about Ahmadinejad and the mullahs of Iran, we are not making some facile comparison. They have stated they would like to wipe Israel off the map. They have been supplying rockets to the Hamas and Hezbollah terrorist organizations in Gaza and Lebanon, and have been aiding the Syrian government in massacring its own people. So, let’s not delude ourselves that the anti-Israel fulminations from Iran are mere rhetoric.
During the time of the Holocaust, there were many Americans who were far more concerned about their own comfort in the United States than about the peril that faced and later consumed a large percentage of the Jewish people.
In a new book by Denis Brian, The Elected and the Chosen: Why American Presidents Have Supported Jews and Israel, he reports that Franklin Delano Roosevelt asked Samuel Rosenman of the American Jewish Committee whether the U.S. should take in more Jewish refugees from Europe. Reportedly, Rosenman said no because “it would create a Jewish problem in the U.S.” (In a footnote, Brian credits a book by the respected historian Doris Kearns Goodwin as his source.)
In the lead-up to the Holocaust one might have argued — as people argue today — that to base one’s vote on a single issue (such as opposition to Hitler) is un-American. There were domestic economic issues to be considered, and matters of social welfare.
Today, we know that none of those other issues–not one of them–was so important to the world, nor to America, as the wholesale slaughter of the Jews and other peoples Hitler considered undesirable. Even though the United States tried to stay neutral when confronted by Hitler’s murderous regime, it was not able to keep itself out of World War II. Hitler’s militaristic allies in Japan brought the war to the United States on December 7, 1941.
Failing to take account of the growing dangers beyond our borders was a disservice to the United States in the 1930s and 1940s, and it is a disservice to the United States today.
Be that as it may, some argue that there is no real difference between President Obama and Mitt Romney on the Iranian issue. Both men have said that they don’t want a nuclear Iran, and have pledged to take whatever steps are necessary to prevent Iran from obtaining such weapons. Both sounded quite sincere in their last televised debate, although Democrats are now saying that investments made by Romney’s blind trust in companies doing business with Iran mean Romney is hypocritical about this issue. We’ll hear more about that I’m sure.
In the meantime, it comes down to evaluating the mind set of the two candidates. In my view, President Obama seems reluctant to recognize Islamist terrorism — whether it comes from Iranian surrogates or from al Qaeda in Benghazi. Romney, on the other hand, has labeled the phenomenon “jihadism” and wants to unite the western world and its allies against it. He has called for criminal charges to be brought against Ahmadinejad for incitement to genocide–a symbolic action, to be sure, but one which helps the West focus on the true nature of the Islamist adversary.
I believe that the notion of political correctness has handcuffed the administration, so that people are afraid to say that within Islam there is a growing group of extremists–the Islamists–who believe it is their religious duty to defeat and kill or subjugate people of different faiths.
That is not to say that all Muslims feel this way; in fact, I’m sure it’s only a tiny percentage. I believe that most Muslims are peace-loving people, who, like the rest of us, were born into the religion of their parents, and want nothing more than to live their lives productively and provide for their families. May God bless them and most Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, Humanists, and every other peace-loving, ethical, person in this world.
On the other hand, extremists who kill in the name of religion need to be confronted, not ignored. That was the significance of the administration’s slow reaction to the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi. By being so reluctant to identify the action as the work of Islamist terrorists, the United States further emboldened them. And allowing the impression to take root that the United States is afraid to offend terrorists increases the danger to the United States, Israel and the Western democracies.
Iran’s nuclear and genocidal ambitions won’t go away because we wish they would, or because we talk nice about them. Iran’s leaders need to know that the pursuit of nuclear weapons and the goal of another genocide against the Jews can be pursued only at these leaders’ own physical peril.
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Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted at donald. harrison@sdjewishworld.com
I am urging everyone to vote for Mitt Romney. Mr. Harrison, the reason you endorse Romney is because it is the right choice. Your heart is not wrong.
With Obama, the we risk a world without Israel… a world we would’nt want to live in.
Sleep easy.
Mr. Harrison,
As editor of this online paper, you have to be as inclusive as possible. The way I understand it, this paper is not published specifically for liberal or conservatives. It is supposed to be a paper for – hopefully – all Jews of San Diego area.
On the other hand, I vividly imagine what kind of letters you received from your readers when you endorsed, however reluctantly, Mitt Romney.
How do I know that? The answer is simple. For four years, I have been publishing my comments on various threads of a very liberal publication – Salon.com.
Of course, one of the topics has always been Israel. Most of my opponents, who not only criticized Israel, which is perfectly OK, but literally took the Palestinian side, were American Jews.
So nothing changed since the World War II. At that time, most of the American Jews didn’t want to lift a finger to do something about stopping or at least slowing down the extermination of European Jews in Auschwitz and other concentration camps. You have already indicated a main reason for that: They didn’t want to “create a Jewish problem in the U.S.” As far as know, there was only one march on Washington organized by Jews. But those were not American Jews, but rather orthodox rabbis from Eastern European countries.
Nowdays, quite a few of American Jews decided to bash an Israeli government in order to be considered the loyal citizens of the United States.
The modern American Jews use the state-of-the-art technology, live in comfortable houses, drive brand-new cars and SUV’s, but psychologically they still are at the beginning of the 20th century when they worked in the sweatshops, organized the unions and supported the Democrats during the election times.
It was about a hundred years ago. Today, the American Jews have a choice they don’t want to use. They, just like the rest of the voters, are given a chance to evaluate the presidential candidates and decide whom they are going to support.
During the last presidential elections, about 80% of the American Jews voted for Obama.
They had four years to evaluate him, his domestic achievements and his attitude toward Israel. One of his ideas was for Israel to go back to the 1967 borders. In my opinion, Obama didn’t have a clue about this subject. He didn’t even realize that if Israel returns the territories it acquired in the Six-day war, it would be no room for the Palestinian State. Israel would have returned the West Bank to Jordan and the Gaza Strip back to Egyptian control. That’s the president we are dealing with.
His policy is not to antagonize the Muslims in the world at any cost to America and to Israel. Even the terrorist act at the Fort Hood by Major Nidal Malik Hasan has been classified by Obama’s administration as the workplace violence.
I am not even going to discuss Obama’s domestic policies. The best idea he could come up with was the wealth redistribution. As an immigrant from Russia, I know quite well what that “redistribution” means. The Bolsheviks had implemented this “redistribution” back in 1917. I don’t want my new homeland to become a victim of a similar implementation of such radical socialist views.
I am not urging anybody to vote for Mitt Romney. All I saying is this:
The American Jews should keep their eyes and minds open while deciding for whom they want to vote. What they shouldn’t do, in my opinion, is to vote along the party lines just because their grand – or great-grandparents did so.