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| Don't blame Jews for this war Samuel G. Freedman USA Today/Yahoo! News April 05, 2003 You just had to know that if there were going to be another American war against Iraq, Patrick Buchanan would blame it on the Jews. Sure enough, last month the reactionary pundit who ascribed the 1991 conflict to Israel and its ''amen corner'' attributed the current invasion to the nefarious designs of ''one nation, one leader, one party: Israel, (Prime Minster Ariel) Sharon, Likud.'' In Buchanan's wake, similarly noxious theories have wafted from the liberal column as well. Rep. James Moran, D-Va., opined, ''If it were not for the strong support of the Jewish community for this war with Iraq, we would not be doing this.'' Gary Hart, the former and perhaps future presidential candidate, warned darkly that the nation ''must not let our role in the world be dictated by Americans who too often find it hard to distinguish their loyalties to their original homelands from their loyalties to America.'' To all this insinuation and innuendo about the devious and clandestine doings of the Jews, there can be only one proper response: So what? There's a word for the interplay of group interests and national interests. It's not conspiracy. It's not disloyalty. It's democracy. Those Jewish Americans who have advocated for the current invasion have nothing to hide from or apologize for; special pleading is part of our country's legitimate political process. By saying this, I hardly mean to sanction the allegations of Jewish duplicity. Buchanan, Moran, Hart and the rest of the it's-the-Jews'-fault club are wrong on the facts. And they surely know that in reducing the reality of a quite divided American Jewish community to the image of secretive, monolithic Jewish influence they are flourishing one of the classic canards of anti-Semitism. Just for the record: A compilation of nationwide opinion polls by the Pew Research Center shows that Jews are less supportive of the Iraq war than the population at large, 52% to 62%. Within the past two weeks, some 465 prominent American Jews took out a full-page ad against the war in The New York Times. While the Bush administration's hawks certainly have included such Jews as Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith and Richard Perle, the gentiles Donald Rumsfeld and Richard Cheney have held identical positions. As for doing Israel's bidding, many American Jews feared war because they assumed that Saddam Hussein would attack Israel as he had in 1991, only this time with biological or chemical weapons. Israel's own defense establishment considers Iran, the state sponsor of the Hezbollah terrorist group, to be a greater threat than Iraq. It is already clear that President Bush will repay his chief ally, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, by turning postwar attention to the ''road map'' for Palestinian statehood. In a larger sense, none of that even matters. The American Jews who publicly or privately endorse the war have no reason to cower behind the skirts of like-minded Christians. As Jews, we have understood the lethal threat of terrorism, whether from Islamists such as Osama bin Laden or from pan-Arabists such as Saddam, more acutely than many other Americans. As in the Europe of the 1930s, Jews are the canaries in the coal mine, the ones whose deaths warn of the risk to the democratic West as a whole. To speak and act out of one's communal experience is the American way. American Jews supporting the Iraq war express no more of a divided loyalty than African-Americans who pushed for sanctions against apartheid in South Africa, or Cuban-Americans who advocate for the continuing embargo of Fidel Castro's regime, or Chinese-Americans who called for U.S. support of Chiang Kai-Shek's Nationalist government against both Japanese invaders and communist insurgents. Does it undermine our national interest that Mexican-Americans for the past several years have been lobbying for a blanket amnesty for illegal immigrants from their homeland? Did it reveal some hidden agenda when Arab-Americans persuaded George W. Bush, as a presidential candidate, to come out during the campaign against ethnic profiling in airport security? ''From the time of Madison to the present, democratic theorists have always understood that groups would promote their particular ideas,'' says Gerald Pomper, an emeritus professor of political science at Rutgers University. ''The task of government is to take the views of these factions and meld them into something that resembles the more general good. Democracy is about free debate, competition of ideas, clashing interests within a peaceful structure for reconciling differences.'' American Jews, for their part, should resist the temptation to play the victim by denying their vigorous role in the public debate on Iraq. Michael Kinsley, writing recently in the Webzine Slate, pungently quoted the claims of great clout made by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a pro-Israel lobby, on its own Web site. How can American Jews denounce Moran for exaggerating their influence, Kinsley essentially asked, and simultaneously brag about it? ''It seems as though we're forced to choose between Jews holding vast and pernicious control or Jewish influence being non-existent,'' says J.J. Goldberg, editor of the Jewish weekly newspaper Forward and author of Jewish Power: Inside the American Jewish Establishment. ''Somewhere in the middle is a reality that none wants to discuss, which is that there is an entity called the Jewish community made up of a group of organizations and public figures that's part of the political rough-and-tumble. There's nothing wrong with playing the game like everybody else.'' Samuel G. Freedman, associate dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, is the author most recently of Jew vs. Jew: The Struggle for the Soul of American Jewry. He is a member of USA TODAY's board of contributors. |