Saturday, July 14, 2007
In reading about 2008 presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani's recently announced foreign policy team, I was quite impressed with the lineup. I was particularly pleased to hear of the inclusion of Middle East studies professor (one of the good guys) Martin Kramer, whose work has become very inspiring to my own at Campus Watch.
Of course, the announcement also resulted in a flurry of the usual anti-Semitic...I mean, anti-Zionist, suspects blogging away about "Giuliani, the Likud Candidate." But Rudy's awareness that the GWOT and hatred towards Israel and Jews are inexorably linked certainly does not disqualify him in my book. In fact, he's one of the few Republican politicians to have made that connection explicitly clear on a number of occasions.
Most notably when he turned down the $10 million "disaster relief" check from Saudi Prince al-Waleed bin Talal (the current patron of Georgetown University's so-called Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding) after 9/11 because bin Talal tried to insert the caveat that U.S. foreign policy (i.e. supporting Israel) was to blame for the attacks. And there's much more.
In an article I wrote in 2004 on the uptick in Jewish votes for Republicans after 9/11 (that in retrospect, turns out to have been somewhat overly optimistic), I had this to say about Rudy's speech at the RNC:
Giuliani referred specifically to the 1985 murder of American Leon Klinghoffer by four members of the Palestinian Liberation Front. It was on the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro that Klinghoffer, a wheelchair-bound elderly man, was, as Giuliani put it, "marked…for murder solely because he was Jewish." He also brought up the 11 Israeli athletes that were slaughtered by Palestinian terrorists during the Munich Olympics in 1972, as well as the travesty that was Yasser Arafat’s Nobel Peace Prize in 1994. In bringing these incidents up, Giuliani did more to appeal to Jewish voters than almost any Republican before him.
Mind you, I'm not trying to endorse any particular candidate, just to give credit where credit's due. And I think Rudy deserves mention for telling it like it is. The vitriol of his opponents is evidence that he hit the mark.
Cross-posted at CinnamonStillwell.blogspot.com.
