Your Abortion or Your Life

Friends,

Just a word of reason: I also don't want the U.S. to go back to the bad old days of backroom abortions. But even if Roe vs. Wade could be overturned by the Supreme Court, that would not stop individual states from allowing abortions. There is no way a woman won't be able to get an abortion in New York or California. So I don't think this is a real campaign issue, or fear. Nuclear Iran is. Please keep things in perspective, as Caroline Glick points out in her well-written article which follows.


The Jerusalem Post Internet Edition

Our World: Your abortions or your lives!

Sep. 22, 2008
Caroline Glick , THE JERUSALEM POST

American Jews have good reason to be ashamed and angry today. As Iran moves into the final stages of its nuclear weapons development program - nuclear weapons which it will use to destroy the State of Israel, endanger Jews around the world and cow the United States of America - Democratic American Jewish leaders decided that putting Sen. Barack Obama in the White House is more important than protecting the lives of the Jewish people in Israel and around the world.

On Monday, the New York Sun published the speech that Republican vice presidential nominee and Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin would have delivered at that day's rally outside UN headquarters in New York against Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and against Iran's plan to destroy Israel. She would have delivered it, if she hadn't been disinvited.

The rally was co-sponsored by the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations, the National Coalition to Stop Iran Now, The Israel Project, United Jewish Communities, the UJA-Federation of New York and the Jewish Council for Public Affairs. Its purpose was to present a united American Jewish front against Iran's genocidal leader and against its genocidal regime which is developing nuclear weapons with the stated intention of committing the second Holocaust in 80 years.

Palin's speech is an extraordinary document. In its opening paragraph she made clear that Iran presents a danger not just to Israel, but to the US.
And not just to some Americans, but to all Americans. Her speech was a warning to Iran - and anyone else who was listening - that Americans are not indifferent to its behavior, its genocidal ideology and the barbarity of its regime. Rather, they are outraged.

After that opening, Palin's speech set out clearly how Iran is advancing its nuclear project, why it must be prevented from acquiring nuclear weapons and why and how the regime itself must be opposed by all right thinking people - not just Israelis and Americans - but by all people who value human freedom.


PALIN'S SPEECH was a message of national - rather than simply Republican - resolve against Iran's nuclear weapons program and its active involvement in global and regional terrorism. She made this point by quoting statements that Democratic Sen. Hillary Clinton has made against the Iranian regime.

The speech detailed Iran's past and current attacks against the US, beginning with its bombing of US servicemen in Lebanon in 1983 and continuing with Iran's proxy war against US forces in Iraq and against Iraqis who oppose its intention of taking control of their country.

By discussing Iran's role in Iraq she not only made a convincing case for why an American victory there is essential for defeating Iran. She also made clear that Iran is actively making war against the US, not just Israel.

From Iran's war against Israel, the US, and freedom loving peoples worldwide, Palin's speech turned to the regime's war against its own people.
She attacked the regime for its systematic repression of Iranian women. She applauded the extraordinary bravery of women like Delaram Ali who risked their lives and their families to demand basic rights for Iranian women.
Ali, she noted, was sentenced to 10 lashes and three years in prison for having the courage to speak out. An international outcry has temporarily suspended her sentence.

Then Palin returned to Iran's nuclear weapons program and its support for terrorist groups pledged to Israel's destruction and to the destruction of the US. She returned to Ahmadinejad's calls for Israel's annihilation. She reiterated Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain's solemn promise to work with Israel to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons and she joined her name to his promise to stand side by side with Israel to prevent another Holocaust.

IF PALIN had been allowed to deliver this speech at Monday's rally, she would done just what the organizers of the rally, and what the Jewish people in Israel, America and worldwide need to have done. She would have elevated the imperative of preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons and the implicit moral and strategic imperative of overthrowing the regime in Teheran to the top of America's national security agenda. Given the massive media attention she garners at all of her public appearances, Palin's participation in the rally would have done more to steel Americans - across the political spectrum - to the cause of opposing Iran than 10 UN Security Council sanctions resolutions could do.

It was a remarkable speech, prepared by a remarkable woman. But it was not heard. It was not heard because the Democratic Party and Jewish Democrats believe that their partisan interest in demonizing Palin and making Americans generally and American Jews in particular hate and fear her to secure their votes for Obama and his running-mate Sen. Joseph Biden in the November election is more important than allowing Palin to elevate the necessity of preventing a second Holocaust to the top of the US's national security agenda.

The rally's organizers invited both Clinton and Palin to speak. It was a wise move. In light of Iran's monstrous oppression of Iranian women, had the two most powerful women in American politics joined forces in opposing the regime and its war against human freedom, their appearance would have sent a message of American unity and resolve that would have reverberated not just throughout the US and in the US presidential race, but throughout the world and into Iran itself. But it was not to be.

The moment that Clinton found out that she was to share a stage with Palin, she cancelled her appearance. By cancelling, she signaled to Jewish Democrats - and Democrats in general - that opposing Palin and the Republican Party is more important than opposing Ahmadinejad and the genocidal regime he represents.

THE JEWISH Democrats on the rally's organizing committee got the message loud and clear. Two of the rally's co-sponsors - the Jewish Council for Public Affairs and the UJA Federation of New York demanded that the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations disinvite Palin.

The JCPA is led by Steven Gutow. Before joining the JCPA, he served as the founding executive director of the National Jewish Democratic Council, which is the Jewish support arm of the Democratic Party. The UJA Federation of New York is led by John Ruskay, who began his Jewish communal career as an anti-Israel "peace" activist in the radical CONAME and Breira organizations.
Among their other endeavors, CONAME and Breira opposed US military assistance to Israel during the Yom Kippur War and called for US recognition of the PLO after the group massacred 26 children in Ma'alot in 1974.

Gutow and Ruskay were supported in their demand to disinvite Palin by the National Jewish Democratic Council and by the new Jewish pro-Palestinian lobbying group J-Street.

In an attempt to assuage Gutow and Ruskay, the rally organizers invited Biden to speak. But he had a scheduling conflict. So the organizers contacted the Obama campaign and asked it to send a representative. The campaign offered Congressman Robert Wexler.

But the Democrats knew that Wexler would be no match for Palin. So they continued on the warpath, absurdly claiming that by inviting Palin (and Clinton, Biden and Wexler), the organizers were endangering the sponsoring organizations' tax-exempt status. That is, through Ruskay and Gutow, in their bid to prevent Palin from appearing at the rally, the Democrats threatened to bring down the organized Jewish community.

Never mind that the threat is absurd. The likelihood that the Internal Revenue Service would open an investigation against every major American Jewish organization for daring to invite Palin to a rally opposing Ahmadinejad's appearance at the UN and Iran's stated intention of annihilating Israel is just slightly smaller than the prospect of Ahmadinejad wrapping himself in an Israeli flag and singing "Hatikva" on the UN rostrum.

But no matter. The fear that these Democratic Jews would openly split the Jewish community on the need to confront Iran frightened the organizers. The notion that the Democratic Party, and its Jewish supporters would openly turn their backs on the need to confront Iran to advance the political fortunes of their party and their party's presidential slate was too much to take. Palin was disinvited.

LIBERAL AMERICAN Jews, like liberal Americans in general, and indeed like their fellow leftists in Israel and throughout the West, uphold themselves as champions of human rights. They claim that they care about the underdog, the wretched of the earth. They care about the environment. They care about securing American women's unfettered access to abortions. They care about keeping Christianity and God out of the public sphere. They care about offering peace to those who are actively seeking their destruction so that they can applaud themselves for their open-mindedness and tell themselves how much better they are than savage conservatives.

Those horrible, war-mongering, Bambi killing, unborn baby defending, God-believing conservatives, who think that there are things worth going to war to protect, must be defeated at all costs. They must intimidate, attack, demonize and defeat those conservatives who think that the free women of the West should be standing shoulder to shoulder not with Planned Parenthood, but with the women of the Islamic world who are enslaved by a misogynist Shari'a legal code that treats them as slaves and deprives them of control not simply of their wombs, but of their faces, their hair, their arms, their legs, their minds and their hearts.

The lives of 6 million Jews in Israel are today tied to the fortunes of those women, to the fortunes of American forces in Iraq, to the willingness of Americans across the political and ideological spectrum to recognize that there is more that unifies them than divides them and to act on that knowledge to defeat the forces of genocide, oppression, hatred and destruction that are led today by the Iranian regime and personified in the brutal personality of Ahmadinejad. But Jewish Democrats chose to ignore this basic truth in order to silence Palin.

They should be ashamed. The Democratic Party should be ashamed. And Jewish American voters should consider carefully whether opposing a woman who opposes the abortion of fetuses is really more important than standing up for the right of already born Jews to continue to live and for the Jewish state to continue to exist. Because this week it came to that.

caroline@carolineglick.com

The "Gimme" Patriot: Ask Only What Your Country Can Do For You

The "Gimme" Patriot: Ask Only What Your Country Can Do For You

By Naomi Ragen

I started thinking the other day why this election is so important to me, and why Obama's candidacy touches me so deeply. It is not just about Israel. It is about America, the wonderful country in which I was born and educated, which is the leader, and last bastion of freedom in a world that is too confused to stand up against the forces joined against human freedom.

Yes, I firmly believe that from the very beginning of his career, Barack Obama has been supported and aligned with forces that are anti-Israel and anti-Semitic. Yes, I believe that he has surrounded himself with anti-Israel advisors. If these facts have anything to do with his Muslim father and step-father, or his early education in a Muslim school in Indonesia, I don’t know, and frankly I couldn’t care less. There are plenty of anti-Semites with Jewish fathers who grew up in Israel. So his family background or ethnicity doesn’t matter to me.

If I really thought- despite this- Obama was a good choice for America, I wouldn’t hesitate to say so. Because having a strong, freedom-loving leader that is committed to American values as head of the free world , helping America to stand fast against its haters, is more important than anything else.

And no, there is no conflict of interest with my concern for Israel. Because there is no way a person like that could be against the struggling little democracy in the Middle East I live in.

What concerns me is that Senator Obama has not shown that commitment, that love, that strength. Quite the opposite.

What concerns me is that even though he and his wife have benefited from every opportunity America has to offer in their education and employment, they don’t seem grateful.

I was a little girl when John F. Kennedy ran and won the Presidency. I remember his inauguration speech well. He said: “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” Obama keeps asking his country: What have you done for me and mine, now or ever? He is a "gimme" patriot.

Barack Hussein Obama and his wife belonged to a church filled with Black bigots, which damned America, feeling no gratitude at all for all the progress made in civil rights, and the many, many, many white people (predominantly Jews by the way) who were at the forefront of the civil rights movement and affirmative action, all things that allowed the poor son of a twice divorced white woman to get an education at Columbia and Harvard and to rise quickly and without impediment to one of the most powerful positions in America. I have never heard him express any gratitude for that. What I hear is how the country is so terribly flawed and how he and his friends are going to fix it by taking money from rich white folks.

And even then, he won’t be grateful. His grandparents, who took him in, brought him up, and cared for him, when his divorced mother sent him there, he has called : “white folks.”

Americans have had years of brainwashing to convince them not to be proud of what America stands for. The Obamas are a product of that.

Obama and his wife with your vote would like to take over the last bastion of freedom in the world and change it into “something” they would be proud of. I don’t know what that “something” would be. But it’s the same “something” that CNN, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times and Guardian, would be proud of, and why they are trying so hard to get him elected. These newspapers are ashamed of Israelis who fight back against terror. They blame Israel for Palestinian atrocities. They ignore crimes against Muslim women by Muslim men in the name of multiculturalism. They claim not to understand the word “terrorist” and never use it if they can help it. They think the war in Iraq that freed the world from Saddam Hussein and his missiles was a mistake. They thought the “surge” which has brought victory was a mistake. They think that Islam is a religion of peace. They ignore- or ridicule- real freedom fighters, like Ayaan Hirsin Ali and Brigitte Gabriel. They ignore vast human rights abuses in Muslim countries, and the vast hypocrisy of the U.N. when it comes to human rights, but believe that 9/11 was brought about because America is arrogant, and not sensitive enough to Muslim “concerns.” They think the solution is to open more mosques, and more medrassas run by the Muslim Brotherhood funded by Saudi Arabia. They believe America must take in more illegal immigrants;practice reverse discrimination favoring Blacks and Muslims; and tax to the hilt anyone who works hard and builds up a nest egg in order to subsidize those who don’t work at all.

The Jewish community in America has been a major beneficiary of American values which has allowed it to flourish in freedom without discrimination. They should be more concerned than anyone that the America that has sheltered them is going to be taken over by those who don’t view that as a miraculous and wonderful accomplishment. By those who aren’t grateful. Jews, more than anyone, should be concerned about a leader who is not proud of all America has accomplished, not grateful, and who wants to pick their pockets to achieve unspecified “change.” I fully expect that the part of the American Jewish community who haven’t attended a synagogue for years, don’t know a word of any of the prayers, are all in favor of abortions and intermarriage, and gay marriage, are going to be more afraid of any candidate with ties to Jews for Jesus, than they are of a candidate with ties to Louis Farrakhan and Kadaffi. That was statistically proven in the last election. But this time, it’s not a John Kerry they’ll get. They’ll get exactly what they voted for, even if they haven’t yet figured out it’s the opposite of what they should want for themselves and their children.

Unfortunately, the results of their vote has the power to weaken the dikes guarding our little Middle-Eastern democracy as well, so there will be no place for them to run. If this sounds alarmist, it is. I am alarmed. More than I can say.