Bush: Good for the Jews?

According to exit polling conducted during the 2004 Presidential elections by RINA (Research Institute for New Americans), more than 75 percent of Russian-speakers in New York voted for George W. Bush over John Kerry.

According to RINA’s director Dr. Sam Kliger, who also serves as Director of Russian Jewish Affairs at the American Jewish Committee, the vote was first and foremost an expression of appreciation for Bush’s strong support for Israel during the Intifada, but also an appreciation for many Bush policies like his tax cuts and embrace of traditional values. Kliger has argued that Russians ‘don’t get’ liberal causes like defense of civil liberties, separation of church and state, and gay rights and therefore prefer the harder-line more traditional Republican approach.

Events of the past week or two might give pause to Russian FOBs (friends of Bush). The recent National Intelligence Estimate report found that the centerpiece of Bush’s foreign policy, the invasion and occupation of Iraq, has become a “cause celebre” that has strengthened Islamic extremism and jihadism throughout the Middle East and around the world, rather than weakening it as Bush has insisted. Does anyone believe that strengthening jihadism is good for Israel—especially since stirring up jihadism can only increase the hatred for Israel and desire to attack the Jewish state? Also, as Americans become progressively more insistent upon withdrawal from Iraq, as will almost certainly happen in the coming months and years, will they be more likely to embroil themselves further in the Middle East by intervening on behalf of Israel? I doubt it.

On the domestic front, we have had a series of horrendous attacks by madmen on schoolchildren, including sexual predators with guns that molested and murdered teenage girls in Colorado and Pennsylvania. Their sickness cannot be blamed on either party, but the ease with which they are able to arm themselves with guns, can certainly be laid at the door of the Republicans, who successfully prevent the passage of even modest gun-control proposals. These are good old Republican ‘family values’; making sure that everyone in the country can arm themselves to the teeth with all manner of guns, and then go and take the lives of innocents?

Now we have the spectacle of Congressmen Mark Foley (R-Florida) being forced to resign after his sick e-mails and instant messages to teenage boys were revealed. And guess what, the Republican leaders like Speaker of the House Denny Hastert and Majority Leader John Boehner—those stern avatars of traditional values—turn out to have been aware of some of Foley’s “overly-friendly” e-mails months ago, but to have done nothing about it except ask Foley not to further contact one of the teenagers he had been in touch with. They were more concerned about keeping things quiet and keeping the Democrats and the press from finding out—so as to protect Foley’s congressional seat--than to conduct an investigation into whether someone who sent such an e-mail might have been trying to seduce other youngsters.


Then there is the detainee bill the president forced through Congress that strips detainees of a habeas corpus right to challenge their detentions in court and will continue to allow U.S. interrogators to use a variety of techniques that much of the enlightened world would consider to be torture, or very close to it. The law, which Bush aggressively pushed through Congress and which many Democrats were too cowardly to stand against, violates some of the most basic rights guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution, as Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich) pointed out when he said that the Bush bill provision “is as legally abusive of the rights guaranteed in the Constitution as the actions at Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo and secret prisons were physically abusive of detainees.”

Many ex-Soviet Jews were beaten, tortured, psychologically abused and imprisoned without recourse to the legal system in their former homeland. They came here to live in a democracy where basic human rights are protected. Can they really be comfortable to find out that some of those basic human rights have now been dumped, as America moves in a more authoritarian direction, thanks to Bush, Cheney and company?

But don’t worry, I hear many of you saying, the kind of abuses we are talking about, will only be done to suspected Muslim terrorists in faraway places like Guantanamo. If you believe that, read the following horror story in this week’s Jewish Week about several young Israelis who were held in a prison right here in good old Brooklyn and claim to have been mercilessly tortured by their jailers as suspected terrorists.


http://www.thejewishweek.com/news/newscontent.php3?artid=13052

Once basic rights start being taken away, it can happen to anyone, Jews included.

Perhaps Russian Jews will begin to rethink their support for Bush and the far right of the American political spectrum. You say that despite everything we shouldn’t forget that Bush is ‘good for the Jews’? Well, with due respect, if Bush is really ‘good for the Jews’, I’d hate to see what ‘bad’ would look like.