Personal Aside: Big Pooh-Bah Jesse Jackson Again Spews

Anti-Jewish Bigotry. But Do Jews Care? Nah.

News that overage racial warrior Jesse Jackson promised that an Obama administration would end slavish U.S. concern for Israel should not be taken as a serious rupture in U.S. Jewish allegiance to the Democratic party. Religion only pertains to the miniscule religiously observant Jewish population. For the most part, prosperity has lessened ties to the old faith. Secular Jews use their identification for social and political purposes…professing to take umbrage at what they call transgression of Jefferson’s “wall of separation”—especially with respect to Christmas observations on public property: but for the most part this is all show. But they have long since passed into observance of a civil religion…something like Rotary Club blandness…with most of them happily trooping to the polls to vote for Obama and all other Democrats.

Old man Jackson…chafing that his influence is declining beyond the earshot of his stentorian rhetoric… spoke at the first World Policy Forum held at a posh French lakeside resort last week. The most significant change would occur in Middle Eastern policy, he said, where “Zionists who have controlled American policy for decades” remain strong but will lose their influence when Obama takes over.

Naïve Republicans may chortle that this speech was a great gaffe but the Jewish vote…and more significantly…Jewish money…is indissolubly Obama’s, something windbag Jackson won’t change. It all goes back to a meeting I attended twenty plus years ago at a synagogue in Skokie when Ariel Sharon, then an out-of-power Israeli general and politician spoke. After he finished he sat down heavily, gulped his iced tea and responded to my question about the Jewish vote. I began by telling him I am a Catholic.

“There are very similar circumstances between our two faiths,” he said. “You used to have Catholics who voted for their faith. Now they vote all the way across the board and there is no discipline from the bishops to correct them. Jews in this country have become so enmeshed in success, in material prosperity, in their own continued well-being that Israel is a matter of little concern to them. Look—our greatest allies here should be evangelicals but I hear all the time Jewish concern that they’re trying to convert us. What rot! Evangelicals see the historic Biblical tie between Judaism and them. The greatest danger to Israel is this secular mentality here and in Israel that wants to erase any distinctions between our religion and secular humanism.”

Nonetheless, look for Obama and his two Jewish slippery surrogates…less observant than secular by virtue of the deals they have made with their opportunistic trade…David Axelrod and Rahm Emanuel to dissociate further with Jackson. These two dine out on affiliation with the religion (Emanuel winning the House nomination by raising his eyes hypocritically heavenward in holy horror because some old coot at St. John Cantius parish-- unsanctioned by the Nancy Kaczak campaign-- alleged Emanuel held dual citizenship. He was wrong but Emanuel squealed like a pig caught under a rusty gate—which was enough to turn the tide. …to try to shush old Jackson. But it won’t make any difference because Jackson himself as a vestige of the old con days when he was busily extorting money from white companies—something that many African Americans want to turn away from. The only following Jackson has is in the Chicago “Sun-Times” where Michael Cooke…not altogether different from Michael Moore…thinks he can wring a few extra readers out of the numbing semi-literate void by publishing the boilerplate column written for Jackson recycling standard Democratic pap.

If it were not for the evangelical vote, pragmatically speaking the Republicans would be well advised to ditch the Israeli cause which drags them down in certain paleo circles anyhow--especially since their loyalty is spurned by the Jewish vote. I can hear crotchety Ron Paul rasp now.