Abe Foxman Doesn't Speak for ME.

On last Wednesday's Rush Limbaugh program--which I heard in its entirety as I was driving home from Tennessee--Rush touted Norman Podhoretz's excellent new book Why Jews are Liberals. As the title suggests, Podhoretz's book attempts to answer a question that is often asked of Jewish conservatives by non-Jewish ones. Rush--an admirer of the estimable Mr. Podhoretz--distills his analysis down to its essentials: Liberal Jews are liberals first, last and always, and their political liberalism trumps all their other "isms," including Judaism.

(I would add that liberal Jews, being in the main irreligious, have filled the void left by lack of religious belief with a secular catechism: the belief in man's ability, through the force of government, to solve the ills of mankind. Many of these Jews are woefully mis-educated in normative Judaism, and have been taught that "social justice" is the primary avenue for fulfilling the Jewish ideal of "tikkun olam"--repairing the world. No one doubts the purity of motive of these Jews; but the result has been--in my view--a self-destructive allegiance to liberalism (and the Democrat Party) that has become synonymous with Judaism since the days of FDR's New deal.)

Rush wondered whether Jews--often self-labeling as "independents"--had been a factor in Scott Brown's decisive win over Martha Coakley for the "Ted Kennedy" Senate seat in Massachusetts. Independents broke for Brown almost three-to-one, and Rush opined that if Jewish independents had voted in the same proportion as independents as a whole, that would be an astonishing political sea change. Rush suggested that Jews--who are well represented in the worlds of finance and banking--might have been antagonized into voting for Brown by Obama's new War on Wall Street.

Apparently this was a bridge too far for Abe Foxman, the long-time national director of the Anti-Defamation League, one of the nation's oldest Jewish activists groups. Foxman issued a press release accusing Rush of anti-semitism, or something close to it. Foxman seems to think that Rush was playing to his audience of bigots and Jew-haters who buy into the ancient and persistent stereotypes that Jewish bankers control not just the money but even much of the U.S. and global government. Foxman then demanded an apology from Rush.

Foxman is either an idiot or a liar. Anyone who has listened to Rush knows that he is a faithful and passionate friend of Israel and the Jewish people. He has often taken on the Left for their growing intolerance of Israel and their blind acceptance of the Palestinian anti-Jewish narrative. Foxman no doubt knows this, and intentionally took Rush out of context to gin up his own base of Rush-haters.

As Norman Podhoretz points out in a post at Contentions, Commentary Magazine's main blog, Rush was suggesting that Obama--by attacking Wall Street--might be the one playing on the fears of anti-Jewish bigots for whom "banker" is code for 'Jewish.' Podhoretz says Foxman "has a long history of seeing an anti-semite under every conservative bed." Foxman has "blinded himself to the fact that anti-Semitism has largely been banished from the Right in the past 40 years, and that it has found a hospitable new home on the Left, especially where Israel is concerned." Podhoretz says Mr. Foxman's charge of anti-semitism against so openly loyal a friend of the Jews as Rush is "chutzpah," and states that it is Foxman who owes Limbaugh an apology.

I must disagree with Podhoretz. It doesn't take "chutzpah" for Foxman to ingratiate himself with his elite supporters and contributors by calling a conservative a Jew hater. It just takes a willingness to foment hatred against conservatives, which the ADL under Foxman has often shown. Late last year the ADL published an outrageous report entitled "Rage Grows in America: Anti-Government Conspiracies," which essentially casts the Tea Party movement and populist anger at government spending and meddling in the free market as a dangerous lurch into right-wing anti-government extremism and violence akin to the white supremacists of the militia movement.

I would link to the "Rage" report here, if I could find it. Both that report and the diatribe against Rush have mysteriously vanished from the ADL's website, although the front page of the website refers to both. Excerpts from the report have found their way onto various "Tea Party" websites, including this one. Foxman lays the blame for the "dangerous" new political environment squarely at the feet of talk radio hosts like Rush and Glenn Beck, who broadcast "extreme sentiments, including Nazi imagery, racist imagery, and imagery that implicitly or explicitly promotes violence." Foxman's report seems almost as if it were ghost written by the George Soros-funded Center for American Progress, which is at the forefront of the campaign to rid the country of the scourge of talk radio under the banner of...wait for it...free speech.

As a Jew, a conservative, and a fan of both Limbaugh and Beck, I am appalled--though not surprised--at the venomous charge by ADL that these great and good Americans are fomenting hatred and violence, when the opposite is surely true. Both Beck and Limbaugh have cautioned against violence or civil disobedience of any kind, calling instead for Americans to engage in politics as the preferred vehicle for reigning in government excess.

Any attempt to marginalize Rush and Glenn Beck and their colleagues on talk radio is nothing short of an attempt to marginalize you and me. It is unseemly in the extreme for a Jewish organization that purports to stand against bigotry to wantonly accuse their political opponents of same through innuendo and lies. It is disheartening that an organization that regards free speech as a religious value would vilify those who are among its greatest champions.

I don't know who Abe Foxman speaks for, but he does not speak for me.