I missed this great Norah Vincent column on Friday, but fortunately Eric Olsen didn't:
Because we support Israel, Americans increasingly are seen as surrogate Jews. We should accept our new moniker with pride, partly because being a Jew is nothing to be ashamed of, but mostly because our alliance with Israel is meritorious in principle.We support Israel because it is a democracy and because Israelis share our belief in liberal politics. Its press is free, as are its elections and society. These are values worth fighting for; they are why we went to war in Afghanistan, after all. And defending Israel against Palestinian suicide bombing is nothing less than a defense of Enlightenment ideals against medieval tyranny.
The Palestinian cause (against oppression and for a state) is another matter, one that all fair-minded people recognize as legitimate. But the present Palestinian leadership and its loudest supporters in the Arab world are hopelessly tainted by their toleration and even covert fostering of appalling Jew-hating, jingoistic rants that appear regularly in the Arab press...
Supporters of this kind of filth are enemies of fairness, sanity and liberalism. So, pick a side, folks; there are only two.