“[I]n their time-honored pattern of countering their own most basic interests, [Jews] are in the forefront of celebrating – and urging on – their self-destruction” (Rael Jean Isaac)
In A Watershed for America’s Jews? sociologist Rael Jean Isaacs poses an important and necessary question: What impact will President Obama’s proposed response to refugees from the Arab Spring wars pose for the demographics of the United States? Her statistics describe a looming crisis for Jews in the United States as well as for Israel so the impending crisis is real. What she omits is the equally dangerous outlook for Christian America.My discussion of Ms. Isaac’s article will appear in three successive blogs. The first, A Watershed for America’s Jews, addresses her headline theme, the implications to America’s Jewish community and for Israel from the president’s intention to absorb refugees from the Syrian conflict well above established immigration quotas. The second, A Watershed for America’s Christians, expands the discussion to include the consequences beyond America’s Jewish community to Christian America. And the third, Radical Islam’s “Crusader” Agenda, describes the ideology and nature of threat promised by Radical Islam to the Christian West described by Islamists as “the Crusaders,” a reference to the first European invasion of the Muslim East.
I. A Watershed for America’s JewsIsaac estimates that there are presently,“five and a half million Jews in the United States. Even before the current Obama escalation, the Pew Research Center forecast the Muslim population would more than double by 2030 to 6.2 million, over-matching the number of Jews.”
She notes that, “Muslims, like other ethnic communities, tend to cluster together and this will have an impact in electing anti-Israel congressmen” indicating an acceleration in already weakening U.S. political support for Israel and her Jewish supporters. American Jews, unlike most other American- “hyphenates” are extremely sensitive to the appearance of “dual-loyalty.” During the Year of the Spy-Irangate, few American-Jewish “leaders” were even available to comment on the arrest of Jonathan Pollard charged with spying for Israel. Of those who did so it as to distance American-Jews from Israel’s spy. At about the same time a Chinese-American CIA employee was also arrested, Wu-tai Chin, with no public distancing by Chinese-Americans. This degree of sensitivity already describes a level of insecurity among Jews unmatched in other American “hyphenate” communities, and deserving a book in its own right!“Jews,” Isaac notes, “are emotionally captured by a parallel with the Holocaust when Jews seeking to escape Nazi Germany were denied a haven by [the United States and all but one other state in] an indifferent West… in their time-honored pattern of countering their own most basic interests, [Jews] are in the forefront of celebrating – and urging on – their self-destruction” by being in the forefront of welcoming Muslim refugees. Myself an often critic of our community self-expression, of our watered-down definition of “Zionism” now generally adopted by Jews across the West and even in Israel, I view her description of the community harsh and superficial. Yes Jews in America are sensitive to the West’s indifference to the fate of our people during the Holocaust: American policy towards Hitler was to abandon European Jewry to their fate. The abandonment of the Jews to Auschwitz cannot be too far buried in our psyche going forward. But in siding with the wave of Arab Spring refugees we are expressing something very different from a “time-honored pattern of countering their own most basic interests, [Jews] are in the forefront of celebrating – and urging on – their self-destruction…” We are, and appropriately as a humane people, describing sympathy based on two-thousand years experience of persecution: the West’s favorite hated minority. Generations of “American-Jews” have, for example, identified with and even died in the struggle for equal rights for African-Americans.As with Ms. Isaac, I am not optimistic about a future for Jews in America. But my pessimism goes much deeper, as described in years of my writings for JPost blogs, and my soon to be completed book.