Friday, April 09, 2010

How the Left views the South

Or at least the part of the Left M.J. Rosenberg represents. He's a “Senior Foreign Policy Fellow” at Media Matters. When speaking at a New America Foundation panel recently, he had this to say about Southern support for Israel:


The whole south shifts to the Republican Party over one issue, they don’t like black people…so you have the racism thing, the fact that we’ve eradicated the separation of church and state essentially, which started I have to say when Jimmy Carter was first elected. As a Jew I noticed it — first president who talked about Jesus Christ, and that was sort of like, “whoa, presidents don’t talk about Christ!”…and now you have the modern Republican Party that has to cater to these racists and that gets me to my fundamental point, it is not that they are pro-Israel. They are anti-Muslim. They do not like Muslims. They are on the side of Israel because Israel is — they don’t like Jews that much to start out with, either — but compared to Muslims, they like Jews fine.

They’re infatuated with the Israeli army. Why? Because the Israeli army kills Muslims. I mean, this is what it’s all about….When you hear them talk to the, I don’t want to say the average American, but certainly the average American south of the Mason-Dixon line, “these Muslims” — well, someone said to me the other day, “how’s Keith Ellison doing?” Because he’s a Muslim member of congress, with all these crazy wackos wandering around, I said “how’s Keith Ellison doing?” and he said, “oh, they don’t bother with Keith Ellison, he’s just Al-Qaeda.” …


Huh. That'll be news to my friends in the Sons of Confederate Veterans, especially with our camp's monthly newsletter that usually had an article on Jewish Confederate history. (And I'm pretty sure it was Christians writing those articles, too.) In fact, I'd grown up in the rural mountain South hearing praise for Jews and how it made no sense for anybody to discriminate against them. Israel was simply the place where Jews got to run their own country, and was our democratic ally.

(Via Commentary