Wisdom of youth

Ben Shapiro is 20, just graduated UCLA and is going to Harvard Law School. He also writes a syndicated column.

Today's offering is well worth the read. For decades Jews in America have been reliable Democratic voters. Much of this comes from their union affiliations in the 30s through the 70s and their loyalty to FDR (who liberated Europe) and Truman (who recognized the nascent Israel despite his State Department's objections). FDR's contribution to Jewish history is suspect -- he turned back a boatload of Jews from Europe fleeing the Holocaust, refused to let Jews emigrate to the US in increasing numbers in the 30s and early 40s for fear of insulting German emigres in the US, refused to bomb the transportation lines to Auschwitz, and held off entering the US in World War II until Japan forced his hand.

Today, such loyalty is misplaced. Most American Jews are Israelophiles and so are Republican presidents (other than Bush 41) but Democratic presidents are not. LBJ was no friend of Israel and restrained Israel from winning an even greater victory in the Six-Day War in 1967. Nixon (who was basically anti-Semitic), however, helped rescue Israel in 1973 by approving sending arms and food during the Yom Kippur War. Carter supported "Palestinian" rights and stood idly by when the Iranian coup installed the Hitlerian mullahocracy in Teheran. Since his presidency, Carter has been actively anti-Israel and pro-Arafat.

Reagan supported Israel immensely; Bush 41 did not but Clinton actively undermined Israel by coddling Arafat and pressing for unilateral Israeli concessions in the modern-day Munich land-for-peace deal. Bush 43 is the most pro-Israel president since Reagan and probably third on the list behind Reagan and Truman.

More importantly, however, Shapiro shows that the threat to Judaism and Jews throughout the world is from secularist liberalism and radical Islam -- diametrically opposed philosophies that nonetheless work hand-in-glove (see International Solidarity Movement), not ultra-conservative Christianity. Here's one key point:

Jews have a long history of liberalism in America, dating from a day when conservatives were "country-club Republicans" and Franklin Delano Roosevelt was deified. Those days are long past. Elderly Jews should realize that FDR is dead and that his party no longer stands for tolerance.

It was Rep. Jim Moran, a Democrat from Virginia, who claimed that a Jewish cabal stood behind the Iraq war. It was former Rep. Cynthia McKinney, a Democrat from Georgia, who took money from anti-American and anti-Israeli terrorist supporters during her candidacy for Congress. It was Vermont's Howard Dean, a Democrat, who labeled Hamas members "soldiers." It was Sen. Robert Byrd, a Democrat from West Virginia, who was once Grand Kleagle in the Ku Klux Klan. It was Sen. Ernest Hollings, a Democrat from South Carolina, who blamed the Iraq war on pro-Israeli interests.

* * *
It was the Nazis who were the secularists -- their sophisticated secularism led millions of Jews to gas chambers. The waves upon waves of white crosses marking the resting places of American dead pay silent tribute to the fact that American Christians, not secularists, died to liberate the death camps.

It was the communists who were secularists -- their hatred for God led thousands of Jews to the gulag. The fields of white crosses that dot the globe mark the burial sites of American Christians who died to keep the world free from that vicious system of government

Read it all.