Here is the speech that Governor Sarah Palin was going to give at the anti-Ahmadinejad rally in NYC. It’s a good speech, and deserves your attention. Excerpt:
Ahmadinejad may choose his words carefully, but underneath all of the rhetoric is an agenda that threatens all who seek a safer and freer world. We gather here today to highlight the Iranian dictator’s intentions and to call for action to thwart him.
He must be stopped.
The world must awake to the threat this man poses to all of us. Ahmadinejad denies that the Holocaust ever took place. He dreams of being an agent in a “Final Solution” — the elimination of the Jewish people.
Note that I referred to a speech that Sarah Palin was going to give. She was not allowed to give it, because she was disinvited from the rally.
Why was she disinvited from the rally? It seems that after Hillary Cinton cancelled her own participation in the rally, certain Democratic operatives threatened the Jewish organizations that were putting together the rally with the possible loss of their tax-exempt status if they allowed Palin to speak at the rally. A ridiculous threat, and one the organizers of the rally should have resisted, rather than quickly caving in.
It would have been a very good thing for leading American politicians to stand shoulder-to-shoulder in support of Israel and against Ahmadinejad’s dangerous madness. If Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden declined to attend, for whatever reasons of political calculation or schedule conflict, there were plenty of other leading Democrats that could have spoken at the rally. Unfortunately, there were apparently some influential Democrats who were more interested in undercutting Palin than in standing firm against the threat represented by the Iranian regime.
Carolyn Glick, in The Jerusalem Post:
IF PALIN had been allowed to deliver this speech at Monday’s rally, she would done just what the organizers of the rally, and what the Jewish people in Israel, America and worldwide need to have done. She would have elevated the imperative of preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons and the implicit moral and strategic imperative of overthrowing the regime in Teheran to the top of America’s national security agenda. Given the massive media attention she garners at all of her public appearances, Palin’s participation in the rally would have done more to steel Americans – across the political spectrum – to the cause of opposing Iran than 10 UN Security Council sanctions resolutions could do.
It was a remarkable speech, prepared by a remarkable woman. But it was not heard. It was not heard because the Democratic Party and Jewish Democrats believe that their partisan interest in demonizing Palin and making Americans generally and American Jews in particular hate and fear her to secure their votes for Obama and his running-mate Sen. Joseph Biden in the November election is more important than allowing Palin to elevate the necessity of preventing a second Holocaust to the top of the US’s national security agenda.
To which I would add: A strong united front against the Iranian regime is important not only to Israelis and to the world’s Jews, but to all Americans and indeed to all civilized countries. Support for Israel is important today for the same reasons that support for European democracies was important in the late 1930s. The Democrats who pressed for Palin’s exclusion have in my view not only harmed Israel, they have harmed their own country and the entire civilized world.
In early 1940, the writer Andre Maurois spoke with Paul Reynaud, who had just become Prime Minster of France. One of the topics was Reynaud’s long-standing rivalry with Edouard Daladier:
Nevertheless,” (Maurois) said, “Daladier is certainly a man who loves his country.”
“Yes,” Reynaud said, “I believe he desires the victory of France, but he desires my defeat even more.”
This may have been a bit unfair to Daladier, who was far from the worst of the leading French politicians of the day. But it gives an accurate impression of the state of things in the late Third Republic. And we all know what happened a few months later.
In the United States today, the focus of the Democrats on defeating internal political enemies, together with wilful obliviousness to the threat from external enemies, is reaching France-1940-like levels.
UPDATE: See Seraphic Secret.
Wold be nice to know who :”disinvited” her. After all, she is McCain’s running mate, and he belongs to the president’s party. Who would have the power to tell her she was disinvited? That said: a stong speech she did not give but does she want us to attack Iran now, and, if so,she should make that clear instead of simply saying “Iran must be stopped.” Everyone says that.
Fred Lapides,
Wold be nice to know who :”disinvited” her.
This was a private event. The events organizers disunited her after the democrats pitched a hissy fit and threatened them with state power.
So much for free speech.
I believe the whole saga from Hillary Clinton’s refusal to appear on the same platform onwards was widely covered. I cannot quite believe Fred is so ignorant of what has been going on.
It’s obvious that many Jews feel the Republican Party does not represent their best interests. It’s surprising because the Republican Party has been far more supportive of Israel than the liberals. The folks accusing Israel of genocide and occupation are from the left, not the right.
I believe that support for Israel from American Jews is pro forma and not serious. I believe that American Jews, for the most part, would love to see Israel surrender to the Arabs to end the violence.
I have been told that the argument is that Israel, to a substantial percentage of non-Israeli Jews, is not supposed to exist.
The restoration of Israel is supposedly tied to the second (first, for Jews) coming of Christ, via some Biblical passages.
Since He ain’t here, Israel isn’t supposed to be there.
This is the reason why a large percentage of Jews, and some Xtians, don’t support the existence of Israel despite the apparent contradiction.
P.S., please don’t argue with me, personally, about that, I’m merely quoting others without really digging into their arguments… But it does seem to explain what otherwise seems like bizarrely self-destructive behavior.
Not sure how encouraging the nuclear destruction of a couple million people is a good idea under any Judeo-Christian concept, though.
…And, thanks to the economic issues, it looks like Obama is going to be leading the way when it happens. Be afwaid. Be wery, wery afwaid.
OBH…people with such opinions may exist, but they’re pretty rare, and I don’t think I’ve ever actually met one.
I think what is much more common is a convergence of two factors:
1)Strong social pressure to conform to accepted “progressive” beliefs, especially in certain industries (academia, publishing, etc) and geographical areas.
2)An unwillingness to admit that there people (like Ahmadinejad) who are not subject to rational, win-win negotiations.
If an individual is already inclined to belief pattern #2, and he lives/works in the kind of environment described in #1, then–unless he is unusually courageous–his desire to fit in socially and professionally will encourage him to strengthed belief pattern #2, rather than challenge it.