There is growing American hostility to Israel.
It all started with the universities, and from there, the younger generations, who are all bought into the groupthink imposed by their professors.
Major Islamic interests have flooded American universities with big money and are pressuring administrators, fundraisers, and professors to give a glowing appraisal of the Muslim world and Islam, while bashing Israel.
But there is a larger problem at work, one which exposes a long-standing failure of the conservative movement: winning the argument by predicting the opposition’s case and refuting it effectively.
One can see the political and cultural fallout that ensued from the redefinition of marriage. President Bush declared during the 2004 debates that he did not know if people were “born gay” or not. John Kerry, going with the progressive leftist talking points, asserted that people are “born that way.”
The fact that conservatives showed no interest in pushing back on these lies allowed those lies to fester and proliferate.
Conservatives knew what they believed, and they stood by their views, but after the Cold War, when everything was nice and peaceful around the world, domestic problems, including cultural Marxism, continued to rear their ugly heads, and conservatives didn’t have the truth prepared with well-researched evidence.
“I just believe that marriage is between one man and one woman,” US Senator and Presidential candidate John McCain said to Ellen DeGeneres on her talk show in 2008. “But, I want to get married, too,” she retorted, painting McCain as backward and bigoted because he wouldn’t support a rash and destructive redefinition of marriage.
Conservatives needed to get back to basics about the fundamental norms and civilizing agency that marriage provides to our society. Yet conservatives didn’t do their research, and they didn’t have answers. Same-sex marriage became the norm, the broad talking point, and then, when the Supreme Court imposed the radical destruction of marriage on the country, conservatives didn’t have any pushback.
The same problem is plaguing the Zionist cause and the case for Israel.
To his credit, Alan Dershowitz wrote The Case for Israel in 2003, but there was no need then for either political party or its partisans to review and reaffirm their views. All of that changed with President Obama, who took more adversarial stances with Israel and openly differed, even defied Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The growing Muslim immigration has also forced politicians, especially in blue areas of Michigan as well as New York City, to accommodate differing views on social and foreign policy.
The advent of The Jihad Squad (AOC, Ayanna Pressley, Ilhan Omar, etc.) into Congress gave a voice to anti-Semitic elements, forcing the Democratic Party to tolerate them, if not outright embrace them. Pro-Palestinian Michigan Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib defeated the African-American political machine in the Detroit area, and the broad progressive movement, based on intersectionality, anti-Western sentiment, and a general need to support the dispossessed or marginalized, lined up behind the Palestinian Cause. In contrast, they castigated the Jewish State as “white adjacent”, Western, and therefore colonialist and even “white supremacist.”
The DEI-CRT-BLM cult included in its frequent activism and attacks denunciations of Israel. I still remember Black Lives Matter-Los Angeles, when they were sending angry acolytes to my home city’s city council meetings, they not only railed against the police department and systemic racism, but they were bashing Israel and demanding Justice for Palestine. No one said anything at the time, convinced that such empty left-wing rants wouldn’t amount to much.
How times have changed, with massive pro-Palestinian (read, pro-terrorist) protests and riots breaking out on college campuses and public squares across the country. The brazen abuses of the progressive left have included harassing high-ranking Democratic politicians, including presidential candidate Joe Biden and then Kamala Harris. Their hatred of Israel is all-consuming, and it’s devouring the well-being of America’s body politic.
For decades, the Republican Party included broad support for Israel, largely because the Evangelical vote was a core constituency of the Republican Party, and Christians support Israel due to kinship respect for the Bible, Judeo-Christian heritage of the country. Nothing could have disturbed that commitment.
Today, Christians are losing touch with their Bibles, and churches have abandoned sound Biblical literacy. They can’t defend their support for Israel or explain why Christian Zionism is sound doctrine in the church. Taking advantage of the distractions and dearth of knowledge, Anti-Zionists have stepped in, effectively questioning foreign policy bona fides for Israel.
Even PragerU has posted videos supporting Israel, but some of them leave key details out. In one video, an American general makes the case defending the $3 billion a year that we send to Israel, and then argues that we should be sending them more.
But why?
Sure, Israel’s government and leaders have engaged in military failures that have harmed Americans in the past. So have many governments. But Anti-Zionists have capitalized on these events, taking advantage of the relative ignorance of the general public, and have begun denouncing the Jewish State. Where is the Zionist movement to counter these lies?
Combined with this outrage, Alt-right activists have championed the “research” of Kevin MacDonald, a disgraced academic who served at Cal State Long Beach. His most notorious work, The Culture of Critique, argues that Jews have been behind the majority of anti-Western movements, including the rise of Communism and Cultural Marxism. His thesis is subjective, his use of data is spotty, and his standards for evaluating evidence are shoddy.
I remember the encouraging response of one of Kevin MacDonald’s colleagues at Cal State Long Beach: Dr. Arlene Lazarowitz, who opposed efforts to revoke MacDonald’s tenure. She was Director of Jewish Studies on campus, was very proud of her Jewish heritage, and she defended MacDonald’s academic freedom, and she urged students and scholars alike to challenge his views.
At the time of publication, however, no serious academics took MacDonald’s work … seriously. And that was a mistake. And here we are today. A growing cohort of young (conservative?) voters now hate Israel, believe that Israel controls our foreign policy, and Jewish thinkers and politicians are poisoning or undermining our domestic policy.
The answer to the rising anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism is not to shout “Racist, Bigot, Terrorist!” at the unfounded attacks on the Jewish State. Advocates must meet these arguments head-on and counter them with research, evidence, and Biblical truth. Instead of mocking the anti-Zionists and their white nationalist “thought leaders” as failed college kids living in their parents’ basements, investigate their claims and expose the lies. I think that Ben Shapiro should debate Nick Fuentes, for example, but I think no less of him if he chooses not to. Mark Levin should debate Tucker Carlson, although chances are Tucker would tuck and run.
Dinesh D’Souza took on Fuentes and bested him. Cam Higby debated the anti-Semitic survivor of the USS Liberty attack, Phil Tourney, and turned the tables on him. What is needed is more debate, not less.
But to do that, conservatives have to develop broad, evidence-based reasons for their support, rather than falling back on tradition and religion alone. This has been the broad weakness of the conservative movement (and I am tattling on myself here), and it’s time to remedy that.
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