Posted by
J-GOP on Tuesday, October 30, 2007 12:46:23 PM
One of the more interesting statements that is heard quite often from our liberal counterparts is the statement, "How can you be Republican and a Jew?". The statement not only assumes that ALL Jews should be Democrats as some form of birthright, but also that there can't be any possible benefit for Jews to be aligned with the Republican party.
Now a recent article posted on the American Thinker (AT) website entitled "Why I am a Jewish Conservative" provides some concrete reasons why it makes increasing sense for today's Jews to vote Republican. The article represents the full text of a speech that author Richard Baehr, AT's political director, gave to Congregation Rodfei Zedek in Chicago. One of the more interesting passages from this speech is the following:
"What is disturbing I think is that so many American Jews have been completely oblivious to the rank anti-Semitic undercurrent in the charge and the danger to American support for Israel that is tied to the effort to associate the neocons, meaning the Jews and Israel, with the Iraq war. The effort by anti-Iraq war critics on the left to tag Israel and its supposed agents (the neocons) with causing the war, has picked up steam recently with the publication of a new book by Professors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt called The Israel Lobby. It was also seen in the vicious attacks on Senator Joe Lieberman last year when he ran for re-election and was rejected by his own party in the Democratic primary."
While liberal Jews strain to find examples that tie the Christian right to anti-semitism, the sad fact that they seem to remain blind to the bulk of anti-semitic and anti-Israeli statements coming from the far left not the far right. Statements from anti-war Democrats such as Jimmy Carter, Cindy Sheehan, Ward Churchill, Sheila Jackson-Lee, and Bill McDermott are shining examples of how far the Democratic party has changed in the past 40 years in their willingness to blame Israel for the problems in the Middle East.
The "rank anti-semitism" of the war-critical left which Richard Baehr points to is one of the reasons why the percentage of Jewish voters that vote Republican in national elections has been steadily rising each election season. According to statistics complied by the Pew Research Center, the percentage of Jews that voted Republican in a Presidential election have been steadily increasing from 11 percent in 1992 to 19 percent in 2000 and to 25 percent in 2004.
Given these trends it's highly likely that we'll see a healthy increase in the Jewish Republican vote for 2008.