Shock of Sept. 11 Is Making Americans More Supportive of Israel, Polls Suggest nytimes.com
[ continuing on that topic, this rather interesting story showed up in the Times today. A little scary, W may be getting hemmed in here. Excerpts: ]
Conservatives want Mr. Bush to press ahead now, to work for the removal of Mr. Arafat at the same time as the removal of Mr. Hussein. Some, like William Kristol, editor of the conservative Weekly Standard, said in an interview last week that Mr. Bush should also be considering "regime change" in Saudi Arabia for its support of a fundamentalist interpretation of Islam that inspired many of the terrorists in Al Qaeda.
[ Perhaps Kristol or the local Saudi-bashers could explain how, exactly, we would go about engineering a "regime change" in SA that both had some appearance of popular legitimacy and didn't result in a government more hostile to US interests. Seems like wishful thinking to me. Of course, Bin Laden's goal is also a regime change in SA, so Kristol is not alone. ]
Over the months, sympathy for Palestinians living under Israeli occupation has dropped measurably, while President Bush's popularity among American Jews has soared, engendering speculation that he could pull more Jewish votes from a Democratic challenger in 2004 than any Republican president in half a century.
"Israel and America are both in a war on terrorism," said Howard Kohr, who followed Mr. Dine as executive director of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or Aipac. "It is these things coming together" and "a recognition that Israel is vulnerable" that have led to a change in public opinion, Mr. Kohr added.
He said Aipac's 55,000 members and a small army of lobbyists in Congress went to full mobilization last fall to merge the Israeli and American view of the war on terror.
{ And no reader of FADG could possibly ever have guessed that was happening :-/ siliconinvestor.com ]
In a Gallup poll in early April of 1,009 adults nationwide, 70 percent viewed Palestinian tactics as "terrorism" and not "acts of war," while 53 percent viewed Israeli strikes on Palestinian targets as "acts of war" and 39 percent called them "terrorism."
Last month the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a group founded on Sept. 13 by prominent conservatives, including Richard Perle, a conservative adviser to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld; Mr. Kristol; and Frank Gaffney and Jeanne Kirkpatrick, both conservative members of the Reagan administration, began running television commercials in the Washington area warning that if a "suicide strategy" can succeed anywhere in the world, "it will succeed everywhere."
Some supporters of Israel in the United States, however, say they want a more moderate approach. They hope that Mr. Bush will pressure Mr. Sharon into entering talks with the Palestinian leadership under Mr. Arafat.
"What pro-Israeli hard-liners are doing that is so dangerous," said Jonathan Jacoby of the Israeli Policy Forum, "is that by making Mr. Arafat into the primary issue, particularly when Mr. Bush is seeking a role for the moderate Arab states, they are risking serious damage to America's other foreign policy interests, such as fighting weapons of mass destruction and dealing with Iraq." |
