Tuesday, February 22, 2011

Attack of the "Jew-Hating Stormtroopers"

A very encouraging development is that the Israel Lobby is increasingly on the defensive with the Republican base. Both Ron Paul and Rand Paul have proposed cutting the foreign budget. A letter from Ron Paul was headlined “Stop buying friends overseas, save $6 billion!”

These calls to restrict foreign aid are framed entirely within the context of a completely out of control federal budget. But that hasn’t stopped the David Horowitz from his usual over the top craziness, painting anyone who doesn’t do everything Israel wants as an anti-Semite: “Ron Paul is a Vicious Anti-Semite and Conservatives Need To Wash Their Hands of Him.”

The “Jew hating storm troopers” refers to hundreds of thugs plastered with swastikas who stormed Horowitz’s table at the CPAC conference and viciously beat up the presenters.

Oh wait. That’s how the scene played out in Horowitz’s diseased mind. In the real world, the people manning Horowitz’s table were confronted by a whole lot of young conservatives who have gotten the message that Israel is an apartheid state bent on ethnic cleansing and oppression of the Palestinians. They seem to be aware of the hypocrisy of Jewish activist organizations that preach multiculturalism for non-Jews and aggressive ethnonationalism for Jews.

And the really encouraging thing is that a great many young conservatives are turning away from neocon Israelocentrism as a paradigm for what it means to be conservative, and that’s all to the good.