Y'know some of my own more complicated feelings about this all is encoded in this.
Why am I, as a Zionist I stuck with "allies" like Warren, Mac Hammond, and Michelle Bachmann - people that I detest on every matter of public policy and frankly don't trust on Israel because of their eschatological vision?
But the fact is, pro-Israel is the mainstream position to the point where to criticize anything Israel does is to risk being labeled a bigot.
This point strikes to why I made the analogy in the first place. Because this means its all about appearance. Pro-Israel is indeed more fashionable than Anti-Israel; but even this is less true than it was 10 years ago. So yeah, I regard it as transient. I don't really trust the safety I'm supposed to have.
They really aren't comparable situations at all. To be blunt, if the gay rights lobby had a tenth the clout in the U.S. government that the pro-Israel lobby does, we'd have had gay marriage years ago.
This is true. Its also true that the Pro-Israel lobby is much older than the gay rights lobby. Which is to say that I think, especially with the work of Joe Solomonese and the HRC the gay rights movement that gay marriage will happen. The clout that AIPAC has was built over many decades.
This is a phased thing. 40 years ago there were places where Jews could not buy property, clubs they could not join, and so on. Barriers were broken down carefully. Taking a hard line rarely worked. During WWII Roosevelt tightened quotas on Jews allowed to immigrate, and ships were turned away; anti-semitism of the lethal sort happened on American streets, at the instigation of Henry Ford's publication of the "International Jew" and its distribution to Polish American Clubs and other "ethnic" organizations.
The reason the analogy doesn't work today is that Jews have traveled much of the distance that gays have yet to travel.
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Why am I, as a Zionist I stuck with "allies" like Warren, Mac Hammond, and Michelle Bachmann - people that I detest on every matter of public policy and frankly don't trust on Israel because of their eschatological vision?
But the fact is, pro-Israel is the mainstream position to the point where to criticize anything Israel does is to risk being labeled a bigot.
This point strikes to why I made the analogy in the first place. Because this means its all about appearance. Pro-Israel is indeed more fashionable than Anti-Israel; but even this is less true than it was 10 years ago. So yeah, I regard it as transient. I don't really trust the safety I'm supposed to have.
They really aren't comparable situations at all. To be blunt, if the gay rights lobby had a tenth the clout in the U.S. government that the pro-Israel lobby does, we'd have had gay marriage years ago.
This is true. Its also true that the Pro-Israel lobby is much older than the gay rights lobby. Which is to say that I think, especially with the work of Joe Solomonese and the HRC the gay rights movement that gay marriage will happen. The clout that AIPAC has was built over many decades.
This is a phased thing. 40 years ago there were places where Jews could not buy property, clubs they could not join, and so on. Barriers were broken down carefully. Taking a hard line rarely worked. During WWII Roosevelt tightened quotas on Jews allowed to immigrate, and ships were turned away; anti-semitism of the lethal sort happened on American streets, at the instigation of Henry Ford's publication of the "International Jew" and its distribution to Polish American Clubs and other "ethnic" organizations.
The reason the analogy doesn't work today is that Jews have traveled much of the distance that gays have yet to travel.