I'm sorry, but the notion that Dubya was a true friend to Israel is exaggerated
Michael Goldfarb at the Weekly Standard points to an op-ed Bill Kristol wrote in the New York Times where he says:
And Anne Bayefsky is right in her assessment of Bush and Condi too.
The problem with Kristol is that he's basically a knee-jerker, who cannot bring himself to criticize Bush for the right reasons. I'm mighty disappointed with Kristol, just like I once was with Jonathan V. Last for supporting a vile comic that I've spoken about elsewhere.
As we recited this on Saturday, I couldn’t help but reflect that a distressingly small number of my fellow Jews seem to have given much thought at all to the fact that President Bush is one of the greatest friends the state of Israel — and, yes, the Jewish people — have had in quite a while. Bush stood with Israel when he had no political incentive to do so and received no political benefit from doing so. He was criticized by much of the world. He did it because he thought it the right thing to do.I'm sorry to tell you this, Mike, and Billy boy, but if you want to read P. David Hornik for example, he tells that the myth of Dubya being a good friend of Israel being wrong on many counts.
He has been denounced for this, as Israel has been denounced for doing what it judged necessary to defend itself. The liberal sage Bill Moyers has been a harsh critic of Bush. On Jan. 9, on PBS, he also lambasted Israel for what he called its “state terrorism,” its “waging war on an entire population” in Gaza. He traced this Israeli policy back to the Bible, where “God-soaked violence became genetically coded,” apparently in both Arabs and Jews. I wouldn’t presume to say what is and isn’t “genetically coded” in Moyers’s respectable Protestant genes. But I’m glad it was George W. Bush calling the shots over the last eight years, not someone well-thought of by Moyers.
And Anne Bayefsky is right in her assessment of Bush and Condi too.
The problem with Kristol is that he's basically a knee-jerker, who cannot bring himself to criticize Bush for the right reasons. I'm mighty disappointed with Kristol, just like I once was with Jonathan V. Last for supporting a vile comic that I've spoken about elsewhere.
Labels: Israel, United States
