Another attack on Jews for the Iraq War
The ADL put out a review on Friday of a new book that claims the Iraq War was generated by Jews working for Israel. This one is a doozy!
John Hostettler
The ADL writes:
Hostettler gets to the red meat of his thesis when he focuses on the neoconservatives, relying on names such as Kristol, Perle, Wolfowitz, Feith, and Shulsky, to convey the specter of a covert cabal that has intrigued to encourage the United States to go to war for the benefit of Israel.
This claim is getting old, but it doesn’t seem to be getting any weaker. Yes, many senior Republicans are Jews. So are many senior Democrats. It isn’t being Jewish that made them invade Iraq, it’s being Republican hawks that did it. Was Douglas Feith more or less important than Donald Rumsfeld? Than Dick Cheney?
As John Bolton once told us when we asked if he considered himself a neocon, “no, I’m a conservative. Neocons are liberals who were mugged by reality. I’ve never been a liberal.” Or as Rumsfeld is reputed to have said in response to this conspiracy theory, “Do they think we all just got off the apple cart?” It was these non-Jewish non-neocon Republican hawks who went to Iraq.
As the ADL notes:
For someone who was a six-term congressman, he seems to have a grievous lack of understanding of the messy and argumentative way policy – foreign or domestic — actually gets made.
American Jews, we should note, have opposed the war more than the average Democrat, more than the average American Catholic, even more than atheists and African-Americans. Republican Jews, too, opposed the war more than the average Republican. Here’s a news report of Jewish opinion on the war put out by Gallup in early 2007. The key points are quoted here:
Asked if “the United States made a mistake in sending troops to Iraq,” 77 percent of American Jews said it had, while only 21% believed the deployment was not a mistake. This figure is in marked contrast to the American average, where only 52% indicated opposition to the war and 46% indicated support.
The Jewish opposition to the war, according to Gallup figures, is not new, and preceded most Americans turning against the war. In the first two years of the war (2003 and 2004), when 52% of Americans supported the war, 61% of Jews opposed it. Even before the beginning of hostilities in 2002 and early 2003, US Jews supported the war by just 49% to 48%. Americans generally supported it by 57% to 37%.
The Gallup figures also show that Jewish opposition to the war is not explainable by the high Democratic Party affiliation among Jews. Even within the Democratic Party, Jewish opposition to the war was greater than that expressed by non-Jewish Democrats. In polls taken from 2005 to 2007, 89% of Jewish Democrats opposed the war and just 8% supported it, while non-Jewish Democrats opposed the war by 78% to 20%. …
The Gallup Organization itself noted that “these data show that the average American Jew – even those who are Republicans and may support the Bush administration on other matters – opposes the war.”
