Tel-Chai Nation

But as Caroline Glick points out, in truth, "conservatives" of Charles Krauthammer's standing are not, and do not support Israel either:

The myth of Sharon and his leadership is that over the past two years he redefined the center of Israeli politics. Charles Krauthammer claimed: "Sharon's genius was to seize upon and begin implementing a third way" (see below). Writing in The Wall Street Journal, Michael Oren argued that Sharon "began his political career on the left, swung keenly right, and concluded in the center." Other conservative commentators, like Peter Berkowitz at The Weekly Standard and James Taranto at The Wall Street Journal's online publication, have made identical and equally false arguments.

It is true that Sharon restructured the political map of Israel over the past two years. But he did not do so by blazing a new path, with a new vision for Israeli politics, society and security. Sharon redefined Israel's political map by embracing the Israeli Left. And in so doing, as one top military official dolefully put it to me in November, "Sharon brought post-Zionism into the mainstream of Israeli public discourse."

[...]

Yet the demise of these policies did not leave Israelis without other options. In the 1996 elections, as in 2001 and 2003, Israelis turned to the Likud and the political Right for remedies. Indeed, in 2003 Sharon won his smashing victory for the Likud after militarily reentering the cities of Judea and Samaria to fight terror, and ridiculing the irresponsibility of Labor's proposed unilateral withdrawal from Gaza.

And then Sharon — for reasons still unknown because Sharon himself refused to explain them — took a sharp leftward turn and adopted the very policies the Israeli electorate had just so resoundingly rejected.

WHILE THE myth of Sharon as a centrist is being propagated by conservative analysts whose sympathies until Sharon's political transformation lay consistently with the Israeli Right, the people who seem most ready to acknowledge the truth are the Leftist commentators. Radical leftist Israeli novelists David Grossman and Amos Oz both embraced Sharon as a man of the Left in commentaries in The Los Angeles Times and The Guardian newspapers over the weekend. Oz wrote, "Sharon's rhetoric changed overnight. First his vocabulary began to sound like that of his rivals."

You could say that this whole disaster has pretty much uncovered a considerable amount of hypocrisy among purportedly conservative writers in the US and elsewhere. Disappointing as it is, it may not be all that surprising. Some conservatives in specific countries may have a lot of loyalty and respect for their own native countries, yet, when it comes to other countries, they may take the opposite path, even towards conservatives.

As far as people like Krauthammer, who works for a leftist newspaper, the Washington Post, are concerned, I am ashamed to be "represented" by people like him. He's done this disgraceful act before, putting his sincerity in question. His positions and goals are flaccid at best, and he's not as smart as he thinks he is. To say the least, what he's doing is representing the politician, not the country that said politician is running. (Edit: and, as I just remembered, his ignorance of suicide bombings and rocket attacks from Gaza is also another serious flaw. See this topic from Power Line for more.) Put another way, Krauthammer is a right-wing moonbat. And if that's how he's going to go about his business, he should not be commenting on matters involving Israel. The same goes for Oren, Berkowitz, and Taranto.

That said, it's interesting to note that, while there are some left-wing moonbats who may now side with Sharon for having turned to theirs, a lot of the MSM still tends to villify Sharon, as Tom Gross points out:

There have also been some nasty headlines and cartoons. "He is the King Kong of massacres" ran the headline of a news report on Sharon on January 8 in The Observer, the Sunday affiliate of Britain's Guardian newspaper, referring to the recently released remake of the 1933 movie classic. "Ariel Sharon, agent of perpetual war," was the headline of an article in the relatively moderate Lebanese paper, the Daily Star, on January 7, 2006, by its editor-at-large and frequent guest on America's NPR, Rami Khouri.

"Sharon's legacy does not include peace," is how a January 5 feature on the BBC News website by Paul Reynolds, the BBC's World Affairs correspondent, was introduced, while Richard Stott's January 8 column on Sharon for the mass circulation (British) Sunday Mirror was titled "Middle Beast."

On Friday, the entire front page of the (London) Independent carried a photo of Sharon with the words "Inside: Robert Fisk on Ariel Sharon." The article, over 7000 words extracted from Fisk's new book, was hardly about Sharon at all, and consisted almost entirely of Fisk's claims about what happened at Sabra and Shatila. Unsurprisingly, Fisk made no mention of Sharon's successful American court ruling against Time.

Proving that it doesn't matter how much you're willing to take their side, they'll never truly respect you.

Labels: Israel, Moonbattery, msm foulness, RINOs