Is Bush Really Good for Israel?
Citing George W. Bush's reputation as the most solidly pro-Israel president in history, some observers predict enough of a shift in the Jewish vote to swing a close election to Bush. But just as his strong-leader image wilted under the scrutiny of the first debate with Senator John Kerry, a hard look at the facts reveals that as a "defender of Israel," Bush has been AWOL.
Distinguishing image from reality is essential in this high-stakes election year. And the ugly reality is that Israel's attempts to defend its citizens from a wave of devastating attacks have been repeatedly met with opposition from the Bush Administration. After Israeli forces killed terrorist mastermind Ahmed Yassin, White House spokesman Scott McClellan complained, "We are deeply troubled by this morning's actions in Gaza," a message echoed by Bush's UN Ambassador John Negroponte, who told the Security Council that the United States was "deeply troubled" by the elimination of Yassin and that it would escalate tensions.
At the same time, of course, the Bush Administration and the American people remain "deeply troubled" that Osama bin Laden has not been killed. The stunning double standard Bush applied to Israel drew sharp criticism from Democratic congressmen as well as the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee. Representative Gary L. Ackerman of New York asked, "How can we take certain actions in response to terrorism, and then tell others that when they do the same exact thing that it is not helpful?" AIPAC emphasized that Israel "will and must take the responsibility to fight terrorist organizations" and "it should be the policy of the U.S. to support" such actions.
On several occasions during 2001, Bush's response to Palestinian suicide bombings and Israeli retaliation was to urge restraint on both sides--as though terrorism and attempts to stop it were morally equivalent. Ironically, the U.S. then suffered a single day of terrorism and the champion of "restraint" launched wars to overthrow two governments at the other end of the globe while taking great pains to hide the involvement of Saudi Arabia, the home of most of the 9/11 attackers and a major source of terrorist funding. While most U.S. journalists treat the scandal of the Bush-Saudi connection as a virtually taboo subject, one exception, Niagara Falls Reporter columnist Bill Gallagher, recently reported:
Sen. Bob Graham, who once chaired the Senate Intelligence Committee and co-chaired the congressional investigation into the Sept. 11 attacks, says the White House blocked a probe into alleged links between the Saudi government and some of the hijackers.
In his new book, Intelligence Matters, Graham writes that Saudi government agents provided money and support to two hijackers who stayed in Southern California before taking flight lessons. He describes how the White House and the FBI stopped committee staffers from interviewing key figures involved in assisting the hijackers. The Bush administration blacked out 28 pages of the congressional Sept. 11 probe dealing with the purported Saudi links to bin Laden's operatives.
Graham writes, "It was as if the president's loyalty lay more with Saudi Arabia than with American safety." It does. His loyalty is entwined with his family's growing wealth, protecting Texas oil barons and his other corporate sponsors, and those interests are inextricably tied to the Saudi royal family.
The Bush Administration displayed breathtaking hypocrisy not only in obstructing evidence of the Saudi-9/11 connection while striking a tough anti-terror pose, but also in opposing Israel's construction of its security barrier--even threatening to impose penalties--while at the same time presiding over many miles of fence along the border with Mexico (the number of Mexicans and Central Americans who have crossed over and committed suicide bombings is zero). As reported in the Forward (October 10, 2003), "The administration has said it may deduct what Israel spends on the fence from loan guarantees...'We have made it clear that the fence...is a problem,' Secretary of State Colin Powell told The Washington Post, in language that has been echoed by Bush."
This administration's indifference to Israeli security (especially during non-election years) and other concerns of Jewish voters is nothing new, but rather the continuation of a pattern. Although it is not a pleasant thing to acknowledge, the reality is that every elected Republican president since the 1960s has ended up showing contempt for Jewish citizens in some vividly repugnant way. Understandably, most continue to feel more comfortable on the Democratic side because of painful memories of:
- Richard Nixon's rants about "Jewboys" and a "Jewish cabal" on tapes released years ago, and his declaration on a 1972 White House tape released in 2002: "The Jews are an irreligious, atheistic, immoral bunch of bastards...The lawyers in government are damn Jews." That same day, the Reverend Billy Graham told Nixon that if he could win re-election, "Then we might be about to do something" about the Jews, or else "the country's going down the drain." (Ironically, Nixon significantly increased his percentage of the Jewish vote in his landslide victory that same year, having wisely followed his own advice to Graham: "Never let them know.") Not surprisingly, Watergate felon G. Gordon Liddy felt free to name his secret Nixon White House unit "Odessa" in honor of the organization that helped Hitler's war criminals escape justice (or, as he strangely called it, "a World War II German veterans organization belonged to by some acquaintances of mine"), and boasted of having the Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will shown in the White House.
- Ronald Reagan's declaration that Nazi SS murderers he insisted on paying homage to at Bitburg cemetery were "victims, just as surely as the victims in the concentration camps." Jewish voters--and a lot of non-Jews--felt that Reagan picked an odd and highly revealing occasion to turn into a bleeding heart.
- George H.W. Bush's September 1991 appeal to the American people to rally behind him to do battle with the pro-Israel lobby ("…a thousand lobbyists on the Hill…We've got one lonely little guy…I know the American people will be with me"), as though Israel were something other than an ally. The senior Bush claimed to be shocked at the flood of anti-Semitic mail that poured into the White House following that specially called press conference. His secretary of state, James Baker, was more blunt, declaring in one meeting, "F--- the Jews. They won't vote for us anyway."
The junior Bush signaled that his administration would be a continuation of his father's when, ironically, he hired Baker to represent his campaign in Florida's post-election dispute in which a key issue was Jewish voters' intentions in filling out a confusing ballot. Baker, who has been keeping busy defending Saudi Arabia in lawsuits filed by families of 9/11 victims, recently returned again to the Bush team to help negotiate the details of the presidential debates.
History shows the Bushes, Baker, and their cronies to have been equally content to prop up murderous enemies of Israel or knock them down--both are good for business. In the meticulously researched 1995 book The Secret War Against the Jews, veteran investigative reporters John Loftus and Mark Aarons point out that beginning in the early 1980s, the senior Bush "conspired to tilt U.S. policy toward Saddam Hussein. Bush was good friends with Saddam's deputy foreign minister, contrived anti-Israel votes in the UN, and made personal phone calls to one of his former Yale classmates to obtain American funding for Bechtel's oil pipeline in Iraq and later to finance Iraq's weapons purchases. The Iraqis received everything the Israelis were denied, from satellite down-links to advanced cluster bomb technology. The Bechtel Corporation was even building Saddam Hussein a chemical factory which he could use for poison gas production."
"In 1989 President George Bush signed a top-secret order, National Security Directive #26, permitting the secret transfer of sensitive weapons technology to Iraq," Aarons and Loftus note. "…Billions of dollars' worth of loans guaranteed by American taxpayers went to Saddam Hussein, after U.S. intelligence reported that he was using the money to build atomic and chemical weapons of genocide."
The motive for policies that endangered the existence of Israel, according to the authors, was the enrichment of Bush, his son George W., and several high Reagan-Bush officials who shared the same conflict of interest involving the oil business: "It is a matter of public record that many former members of the Reagan-Bush administrations had such heavy investments in oil companies that they had a clear conflict of interest in determining U.S. policy in the Middle East," they point out. George H.W. Bush secretly waived the Federal conflict of interest policy. Many members of his administration have enriched themselves in the Gulf states after leaving government service. Even Bush's son George Jr. was awarded a lucrative oil contract in the Gulf. No matter which side triumphed in the Gulf War, the oil men had won…"
Is it fair to tie a son to his father's actions in the Mideast? In this case, the answer is a resounding yes. George W. Bush's influential role as a campaign manager for his father's 1988 presidential run removes any doubt that he was fully on board with policies that were dangerous to Israel but lucrative for him personally.
The hostility toward the interests of the Jewish community expressed at the highest levels of the Republican establishment appears to be a definite pattern rather than a collection of isolated incidents, especially when one sees the same untrustworthy cast of characters coming back to play a role from one administration to the next. Patrick Buchanan--who has mocked Jewish death-camp survivors as liars with "group fantasies of martyrdom and heroics," and whose Holocaust-denial propaganda has sometimes been indistinguishable from that spread by neo-Nazis--served in three Republican White Houses. No one was more outspoken than Buchanan in urging Reagan to pay tribute to Hitler's murder squads at Bitburg (yet two decades earlier he had begged Nixon not to honor Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., arguing that it would offend good Americans who view the Nobel Peace Prize recipient as "divisive" and "the Devil incarnate.") He was featured as a major speaker at the 1992 Republican Convention, and went on to win the New Hampshire presidential primary in 1996. We also find Fred Malek, who loyally followed Nixon's orders to count the number of Jews in important government positions, being called back to service by the senior Bush; James Baker serving both Bushes; and Reverend Graham, who incited the already unstable Nixon with his talk of "satanic Jews," settling a theological argument between George W. Bush and his mother by reassuring George that he was correct in his belief that only Christians can get into Heaven.
If the U.S. media were not once again giving George W. Bush a free pass, millions more voters would be aware of his crackpot assertion that non-Christians are barred from Heaven and his tacit approval of overt anti-Semitism when it benefits him politically. Perhaps even more disturbing than his extremist theological belief is the fact that he thinks there is something funny about it; before a pre-election trip to Israel, when a reporter asked what he planned to say to the Israelis, Bush replied that he planned to tell them to "go to hell," a joking reference to his belief in an exclusively Christian Heaven (a remark which, had it been uttered by John Kerry, no doubt would have doomed his candidacy).
Sadly, Bush did not appear to mind when his campaign workers called South Carolina primary voters in 2000 to warn that John McCain was being supported by a Jew, ex-Senator Warren Rudman; or when his adviser, born-again Christian Marvin Olasky, described three Jewish writers as having holes in their souls and following the religion of Zeus. (Similar exclusionary messages have been heard during this administration from Republican House Majority Whip Tom DeLay--"Only Christianity offers a way to live in response to the realities we find in this world--only Christianity"--and former House Majority Leader Dick Armey, who declared at a campaign event for Florida's Katherine Harris that the overwhelming majority of American Jews have a "shallow, superficial intellect.")
With this troubling record in mind, the current administration's failure to support Israel consistently in times of tragedy and peril--sometimes going so far as to condemn Israel's attempts to defend its citizens militarily and even nonviolently--should not come as a surprise. This year, with so much at stake, it is crucial that Jewish voters cut through image, hype, and wishful thinking to make an informed choice about who really is on their side.