www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/editorials/2003-04-02-freedman_x.htm
Freedman 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. There's a word for the interplay of group interests and national interests. Those Jewish Americans who have advocated for the current invasion have nothing to hide from or apologize for; 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. 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. 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? 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? Goldberg, editor of the Jewish weekly newspaper Forward and author of Jewish Power: Inside the American Jewish Establishment. Freedman, associate dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, is the author most recently of Jew vs.
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