Whither (or, maybe, wither) the Jews?
Bookworm on Nov 15 2006 at 10:53 am | Filed under: Elections, Jews, Media matters
What were Jewish voters doing last Tuesday? To hear the MSM tout it, they were returning to the Democratic fold in droves, at least according to one exit poll. However, Richard Baehr rides to the rescue to say, “Not so fast, my fine MSM friends.” It turns out that the single exit poll may be just a wee bit misleading, not to mention the fact that it ignores important long-term demographic trends in the Jewish community (liberal assimilationists are not breeding; orthodox, politically conservative Jews are). Anyway, if you find this subject as interesting as I do, you should definitely read it all here.
By the way, immediately after reading Richard Baehr’s piece, you need to head over to Soccer Dad to learn more about representative John Conyers from Michigan, who is likely to become the new chair of the powerful House Judiciary Committee. I’d forgotten that this is the same Conyers who held a mock impeachment hearing of George Bush (with, as I recall, the obligatory anti-Semitic references). He’s also busy trying to enshrine legislation aimed at giving special protections to Muslims (although Soccer Dad carefully points out that they don’t need those protections). All in all, it’s a pretty eye-opening piece, and well-deserving of the encomium it got at LGF.
I mention Soccer Dad’s post in the context of this post because, if Conyer’s elevation doesn’t put the fear of marginalization and discrimination in the hearts of American Jews nothing will. They’ll deserve to sink down into the backwaters of history — I’m just sorry that I, and perhaps all of us, will have to go with them.
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3 Responses to “Whither (or, maybe, wither) the Jews?”
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Thanks for the link.
I’d like to point out that the excellent Conyers piece is not my doing but that of my co-blogger Daled Amos.
Speaking about Jews, I think this is not only good but relevant. (yes, yes, joke, Ymar never says relevant things) This is good, I be promising.
What is the just cause that would justify putting our armed forces, and the American homeland, in harm’s way?
Who has the authority to wage war? The President? The President and Congress? The United States acting alone? The United States with a sufficient number of allies? The United Nations?
Is it ever right to use armed force first? Can going first ever be, not just morally permissible, but morally imperative?
How can the use of armed force contribute to the pursuit of justice, freedom, and order in world affairs?
That these are the questions that instinctively emerge in the American national debate suggests that the just war tradition remains alive in our national cultural memory. And that is a very good thing. But it is also a somewhat surprising thing, for the past thirty years have witnessed a great forgetting of the classic just war tradition among those who had long been assumed to be its primary intellectual custodians: the nation’s religious leaders, moral philosophers, and moral theologians. That forgetting has been painfully evident in much of the recent commentary from religious leaders in the matter of U.S. policy toward Iraq, commentary that is often far more dependent on political and strategic intuitions of dubious merit than on solid moral reasoning. The fact of the matter today is that the just war tradition, as a historically informed method of rigorous moral reasoning, is far more alive in our service academies than in our divinity schools and faculties of theology; the just war tradition “lives” more vigorously in the officer corps, in the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and at the higher levels of the Pentagon than it does at the National Council of Churches, in certain offices at the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, or on the Princeton faculty. (There are different degrees of forgetfulness here, of course, and recent statements by the U.S. Catholic bishops on the question of Iraq were of a higher degree of intellectual seriousness than the effusions of other national religious bodies. But the bishops’ statements did, I would argue, continue a pattern of just war forgetfulness whose origins I shall discuss below.)
http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft0301/articles/weigel.html
Hattip to Sergey at Neo’s comments section for the link. Gooooaaal Sergey!!
Don’t worry about all these “typos” about blog authors, Bookworm ; )
I don’t think of you as a Jew or lawyer, primarily because to me, you are a gracious host and a good person. If more people were like you, the human race would be much better off.