http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=3632
by Paul Gottfried
On late Friday afternoon, my least favorite Protestant spokesman, who is not Jeremiah Wright but the ever unctuous Ralph Reed, came on to FOXNEWS to express his “outrage” over the “anti-Semitism” now http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=3757 camp. It seems that the controversial Reverend Wright had been heard praising Hamas, or else had been heard praising someone who was thought to be close to this anti-Israeli organization. Reed could not stand the idea that American Jews or Israeli Jews would suffer at the hands of Wright’s parishioner, if Obama managed to get elected.
Note this is the same Ralph Reed, who when he headed the Christian Coalition (before becoming a direct Republican employee) apologized to Abe http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=1640. Perhaps Reed’s English Baptist ancestors were out there stoking the fires of the autos-da-fe in sixteenth-century Spain. And even if they weren’t, any apology from a designated victimizer group, and especially from white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, is as good as any other act of contrition. My question is whether Reed really believes that American Jews are cretins who need him to point out the obvious, in this case that Obama, being a minority-sensitive leftist, would be more sympathetic to the Palestinians, as victims of “Western imperialism,” than he would to the Israelis as “colonizers.” One would simply assume that Obama and Wright, who in so many ways sound like the current European Left, would lean heavily toward the Palestinian side in the current Middle Eastern conflict. I suspect that American Jews, who are mostly left of center in their politics except on the Middle East, are willing to support Obama for some of his explicitly leftist stands, while believing they could push him toward embracing their own stand on Israel. Thus far he has cooperated, if one is to judge by his statements on the Middle East since he jumped into the presidential race.
What is for me far more disturbing than Jewish leftist politics is the silly kissing-up to American Jews and, even more obviously, to neoconservative benefactors that Republican operatives and the neoconservatives’ employees engage in. The most ludicrous example of this I’ve encountered to date occurred when Michael Novak who came to our college as a speaker explained: “I hate Hollywood because it’s so anti-Semitic.” When one of my colleagues pointed out to Novak that the leftist producers and film company owners he was denouncing were overwhelmingly Jewish, he appeared to be surprised. My guess is that Novak spewed out this nonsense in order to score points with his bosses, and not because he believed it was true.
http://www.takimag.com/blogs/article/the_ever_odious_reed/