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All They Do Is Lose

by Ben Packer
written by Ben Packer

David Friedman will be confirmed as US Ambassador to Israel. Just like all the other Trump nominees have already or will be confirmed. This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone – its simple math. The Republicans control the White House and the Congress.

Since its Black History Month, I have been paying particular attention to the urban beats. There is one recent hit called, “All I do is win”. Its very catchy. A little too materialistic and sexually explicit, but nonetheless, I like the enthusiasm.
Those on the left, particularly the “reform movement”, seemed to have ignored this wondrous time of year and embraced their own opposite refrain of “all we do is lose”. Because all they do is lose.
They lost the White House (and before that the Congress). They will lose all of these confirmations. And most importantly, Friedman’s upcoming confirmation will symbolize the biggest loss of all – the end of their catastrophic representation of American Jewry.
The “reform movement” declares that Mr. Friedman is “the wrong man for this essential job at this critical time”(http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/225210)
This is absurd, but incredibly accurate in describing the role the “reform movement” has played in the American Jewish experience. All they’ve done is lose. They’ve lost millions of Jews.
Ambassador Friedman’s confirmation is an important step in the process of reversing this horrific trend and making American Judaism great again!
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Politics

SENATOR MENENDEZ AND THE POLLARD EFFECT

by Caroline Glick
written by Caroline Glick

How anti-Semites are being emboldened by the continuing unfair treatment of Pollard.

Speaking to his ministers on Sunday about his visit last week to Washington, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu heralded a new era in US-Israel relations. To a degree, he was correct.

When US President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump greeted Netanyahu and his wife Sara as they alighted from their car at the southern entrance to the White House, Trump demonstrated that the eight years of hostile treatment Israel suffered at the hands of his predecessor Barack Obama were no more.

But unfortunately, Obama wasn’t the only thing that was wrong with US-Israel relations.

There is also a problem with antisemitism.

Rather than confront the problem head on, and where it does Israel and American Jewry the most damage, Netanyahu shied away from contending with the issue.

This was a mistake.

Just hours after he left town, another American Jew was targeted by an antisemitic slander of the sort Netanyahu failed to address during his meeting with Trump.

Thursday afternoon, the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee held a confirmation hearing for Trump’s ambassador designate to Israel, attorney David Friedman.

Friedman is a Jewish attorney. He is unapologetic about his support for Israel. The fact that unlike his liberal Jewish predecessors, Friedman does not make his support for Israel contingent on Israel’s willingness to appease the territorial and other demands of the PLO , made him the subject of withering criticism at the hands of several Democratic lawmakers.

While unpleasant, the scathing criticism Democratic senators leveled against Friedman was within the bounds of legitimate debate. They support a different, less supportive policy toward Israel than the policy that the Trump administration is developing. They receive support from liberal Jewish groups that insist there is no contradiction between funding Palestinian terrorists (in the name of the chimerical two-state solution), and supporting Israel.

What was not within the bounds of legitimate debate however, was a question that Democratic Senator Robert Menendez posed to Friedman. Noting that Friedman is “very passionate about Israel,” Menendez asked Friedman to assure the senators that his loyalty and commitment lay with the US, rather than with Israel.

Menendez’s query was beyond the pale because it wasn’t about Friedman’s positions. It was about his Judaism. Inherent to Menendez’s question was a barely disguised insinuation: Jews who are passionate about Israel cannot be trusted by their fellow Americans.

There are many distressing aspects to Menendez’s decision to use an antisemitic line of questioning against Friedman. It is distressing, for instance, that liberal Jewish groups like the Anti-Defamation League did not condemn the liberal lawmaker for trafficking in antisemitism.

But by far, the most distressing aspect of Menendez’s allegation that Jews who support Israel passionately and unapologetically are inherently disloyal to the US was its familiarity. The canard that Jews are inherently disloyal has been the bane of the Jewish community in America for generations.

It doesn’t matter how much you love America. It doesn’t matter how much of your life you devote to advancing the interests of America.

If you are a Jew, and you support Israel, then your loyalty to America will be questioned.

This brings us back to Netanyahu and his failure to address the issue of antisemitism in his meeting with Trump.

There is one issue where Netanyahu is uniquely positioned to fight the canard that pro-Israel Jews are disloyal to America.

That issue is the plight of Jonathan Pollard.

Pollard was sentenced to life in prison in 1985 for transferring classified materials to Israel. He was paroled in 2015.

Pollard’s plight is important for two reasons that bear direct relevance to Menendez’s antisemitic behavior at Friedman’s confirmation hearing and to the general problem of antisemitism in America.

First, Pollard is proof of American antisemitism.

To be sure, Pollard failed the loyalty test. America trusted its secrets to Pollard 35 years ago when he served as an analyst in US Naval Intelligence. And he betrayed that trust when he revealed American secrets to Israel.

Pollard though is not unique. Korean Americans, Japanese Americans, Italian Americans, French Americans, Irish and German Americans have also transferred American secrets to foreign governments with which they felt a kinship. To the extent they transferred secrets to states that are allies of the US, they received prison sentences that ranged on average between two to five years and served their terms in minimum security prisons until they were released back into society and free to leave the US.

Pollard, in contrast, was railroaded by the US justice system. He was given a life sentence and served for 30 years in maximum security prisons. He spent his first 10 years in prison in solitary confinement.

Over the 30 years he sat in prison, US national security officials and lawmakers on both sides of the partisan divide called for successive presidents to commute his sentence.

They all refused.

And when Pollard was finally paroled in November 2015 his nightmare of persecution didn’t end. Instead he was given draconian parole conditions that no prisoners are subjected to in state or federal prisons. Not only is Pollard barred from leaving the country, he is barred from leaving Manhattan.

He cannot practice Judaism because he is confined to his apartment from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. so he cannot attend morning and evening prayers. He cannot keep Shabbat because he is required to wear a GPS tracking device that he must charge in an electrical outlet every few hours, including on Shabbat when such activities are prohibited. He cannot get a job because anyone who hires him will be required to allow the government total access to their computer network.

Pollard’s disproportionate punishment is a powerful expression of official, state-sanctioned antisemitism in America. And since 1985, it has served as a warning to American Jews and as a license to antisemites like Menendez to discriminate against American Jews.

For 30 years, as Pollard served out his life sentence at a maximum security prison, no one needed to do anything more than mention his name to put fear into the hearts of American Jews. The message was clear. It doesn’t matter what you do. We will destroy your life if you are too supportive of Israel.

As for US relations with Israel, successive administrations have held Pollard over the heads of Israeli governments. On the one hand, they would on the one hand dangle the prospect of his release in front of their Israeli counterparts to exact concessions. The concessions were invariably made and the promise to release Pollard was always withdrawn.

On the other hand, Pollard’s crime, and his incarceration, afforded successive administrations the ability to use antisemitism as a political tool against Israel domestically. Every few years when public support for Israel hit a new high, a mid-level national security official would give a background briefing to reporters and raise allegations of Israeli spying, along the lines of Pollard’s actions. The subsequent reports would instigate a public debate about Israel riven with anti-Israel and anti-Jewish vitriol.

During his meeting with Trump, Netanyahu chose not to bring up Pollard and Pollard’s scandalous parole terms. Instead, Netanyahu sufficed with discussing Pollard’s plight at his meeting with Vice President Mike Pence. According to media reports, the two men agreed that Ambassador Ron Dermer will work with the administration on the issue. What that means was left open to interpretation.

Given the devastating role the Pollard affair has played in US-Israel relations, it is understandable that Netanyahu wouldn’t want to bring up Pollard at his first meeting with Trump. Who wants to bring up unpleasant subjects when you’re trying to build a new relationship with a new US president?

But while understandable, Netanyahu’s decision to minimize his discussions of Pollard’s plight and then delegate the issue to his ambassador was the wrong way to build that relationship.

Every day Pollard is subjected to prejudicial treatment by the US justice system is another day that the US is officially persecuting an American Jew, not because he breached his oath to protect US secrets, but because he did so as a Jew.

And as Menendez’s bigotry toward Friedman made clear, every day that this continues is a day when it is acceptable to slander loyal American Jews simply because they passionately support Israel. Every day that Pollard languishes under effective house arrest is another day when it is acceptable to question the good intentions of America’s greatest ally in the Middle East.

In other words, to rebuild its alliance with the US, Israel needs more than a warm embrace at the White House. It needs to receive Pollard at Ben Gurion Airport.

Originally published by the Jerusalem Post. 

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PoliticsUnited States

TRUMP’S JEWS AND OBAMA’S JEWS

by Daniel Greenfield
written by Daniel Greenfield

The Left is losing the culture war within the Jewish community.

Seen from above, the 2016 electoral map of New York City is blue with dots of red. Trump’s home district is blue, but across the water a red wedge slices into Brooklyn. Around that red wedge are districts where Hillary won 90 percent of the vote and Trump was lucky to get 5 percent. Inside it, he beat her in district after district.

The voters who handed him that victory are the Chassidic Jews of Williamsburg who dress in fur hats and black caftans. Their districts, crammed in by hipsters and minorities, are a world away from the progressive activist temples whose clergy went into mourning at Hillary’s loss.

East of Prospect Park, in a vast sea of blue, is what looks like a red sofa. Trump won here with the Chabad Chassidim of Crown Heights. He won in the more mainstream Orthodox Jewish communities of Flatbush. He won by huge margins among the Russian Jewish immigrants of Brighton Beach who listen to a man dubbed the “Russian Rush Limbaugh.”

As the left-wing Forward put it, “Nearly every election district that Trump won in Brooklyn was in a Jewish neighborhood.” But it was a certain type of Jewish neighborhood. The wrong type.

“You can compare them to Rust Belt voters,” a Forward source states. “They are hardworking people, not college educated.”

And then in Far Rockaway where the housing projects by the beach give way to the red Orthodox Jewish communities that extend into Long Island.

There’s a line that recurs again and again in the attacks on David Friedman; the man picked by President-elect Trump to serve as the ambassador to Israel. It’s not stated openly. It’s implied.

“David Friedman, a bankruptcy lawyer from Long Island,” is the sneering summary.

Remnick, the New Yorker’s left-wing editor, took the sneering to a new level, titling his smear as “Trump’s Daily Bankruptcy.” Jewish identity, he declares, has never been a matter of “bankruptcy law.”

To a certain class of elites, it is self-evidently absurd that a bankruptcy lawyer from Long Island be appointed to anything or be listened to about anything. David Remnick is a Washington Post man married to a New York Times woman who went on to inherit the editorship of the New Yorker and turn it into a left-wing echo chamber. He lives in a $3.25 million four-bedroom Manhattan apartment with a wood-burning fireplace.

And David Friedman is the Orthodox son of a Rabbi from Woodmere who still lives there. His father was a Republican who hosted President Reagan. He might occasionally be allowed to read the New Yorker.

And that’s about it.

Yet it’s hard to think of anything that might recommend Friedman more to Trump.

Over at New York Magazine, Frank Rich and Fran Leibowitz famously chuckled over Trump being “a poor person’s idea of a rich person.” David Brooks, the token slightly right of the left voice at the New York Times, full of contempt for Trump, in an infamous moment, studied Obama’s “perfectly creased pant” and came to the conclusion that, “he’ll be a very good president.”

“I divide people into people who talk like us and who don’t talk like us,” Brooks has said.

Obama spoke like one of the collective “us”. Trump and Friedman don’t talk like “us”. Their voices are distinctly working class. Their New York values are those of a grittier and grimier country.

Trump’s calling card was, “Make America Great Again”. Obama’s was a memoir about race and identity that was a hit on college campuses. Two cultures could hardly be further apart.

The internal war in America and among Jews over Trump is not just about politics, it’s also about class. Trump’s victory was the uprising of a cultural underclass. That is equally true among Jews.

The same divide exists between the slick branding of J Street’s conferences stocked with self-appointed thought leaders who have never worked for a living and the hard-working Jewish communities who loathe the New York Times for its hostility to Israel. These are the Jews who have never been represented in national politics. Whom most of the left didn’t even know existed.

Friedman’s appointment led leftists like Remnick to undertake a baffled archeological survey of Arutz Sheva: a popular pro-Israel news site that no one at the New Yorker had ever heard of. The elites of the left have suddenly had to grapple with the existence of people who don’t talk like “us” or think like “us”.

And that for many voters, non-Jewish and Jewish, encompassed the thrill of Trump. Voting for Trump forced the elites that had ignored them out to acknowledge their existence for the very first time.

The split is as real among Jews as it is in the rest of America. Trump’s victory allowed Jewish communities that had been shut out of the national dialogue to have a voice. The divide over Israel is not only about policy, but about culture and class. The divide between readers of the Jewish Press and the Forward is as real as the yawning gap between country music listeners and the NPR audiences.

Trump and Obama both have inner circles filled with Jews. But they are as different as David Remnick is from David Friedman, as Jan Schakowsky is from Boris Epshteyn, or as J Street’s Jeremy Ben Ami is from Jason Greenblatt, a Trump advisor who performed armed guard duty while studying in Israel.

Obama is legitimately baffled by accusations of anti-Semitism. His inner circle of left-wing Jews agree with him that the Jewish State is the problem and aiding Islamic terrorists is the solution. His echo chamber elevated marginal left-wing organizations like J Street or Yeshivat Chovevei Torah into representatives of American Jews. Meanwhile his people, like ADL boss Jonathan Greenblatt, took over already liberal Jewish organizations and turned them into lobbies for his anti-Israel agenda.

Now suddenly the President-elect is surrounded by a very different breed of Jews. Instead of tenured academics, progressive journalists and irreligious clergy for whom Jewish values, like American values, mean appeasement and surrender to terrorists, a very different kind of Trump Jew is now on the rise.

Trump’s Jews are scrappy businessmen and tough lawyers. They live in traditional suburban communities instead of hip urban neighborhoods. They are more likely to be religiously devout and have large families. And they don’t look or sound like the “us” of the leftist elites.  They don’t have the “perfectly creased pant”. Instead they look like the suburban dads and granddads that they are.

They believe that you have to work hard to get ahead. They know that you have to be tough to succeed. And they’ve learned to get ahead without caring what the liberal elites think of their manners and style.

In that they’re a whole lot like Trump. And a whole lot like the stereotypical Israeli.

It’s not just the substance of their message, pro-American, pro-Israel and pro-work, that horrifies the Remnicks of the left. It’s the conviction that they’re part of a social underclass that doesn’t belong on stage. The Remnicks have worked hard to ape the manners and attitudes of their progressive betters. There was a time when his ilk dared to be pro-Israel. But when the liberals went left, they went with them. They justified their betrayal by blaming Israel for “moving to the right” and alienating them.

But Trump’s Jews, whether it’s his advisers, who look like every other professional or small businessman in Long Island or Teaneck, or the Chassidic and Haredi Jews of Brooklyn who voted for him, make no apologies for who they are. They pray toward Jerusalem, not Martha’s Vineyard. They do not cringe inwardly when Israel takes out a terrorist. They are not politically correct. They are Biblically correct.

They are not ashamed of their Jewishness. And now their voice is being heard.

In the fall of ’84, President Ronald Reagan showed up at the home of a Long Island Rabbi for a Sabbath meal. David Friedman’s mother spent three days shopping and prepared stuffed chicken cutlets, apricot noodle pudding and an apple crumb cake. Reagan toasted her as “a woman who makes a meal better than a state dinner.” Meanwhile outside, left-wingers protested hysterically against the visit.

At Rabbi Friedman’s synagogue, President Reagan declared, “the so-called anti-Zionists that we hear in the United Nations is just another mask in some quarters for vicious anti-Semitism. And that’s something the United States will not tolerate wherever it is, no matter how subtle it may be.”

The United States has tolerated it for far too long from Barack Hussein Obama.

When Rabbi Friedman passed away, Donald J. Trump, a future Republican president, drove to Long Island through a snowstorm to pay a condolence call to his son. Trump has chosen the man who sat at the table with President Reagan, that “bankruptcy lawyer from Long Island” as ambassador to Israel.

The left is so angry because it senses that it is losing the culture war within the Jewish community. The future does not belong to David Remnick. It belongs to David Friedman.

Originally Published on FrontPageMag.

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