Take a look ah the Issue groups focused on the Middle East that Project Vote-Smart tracks:
See a pattern? Yes, I thought so.
I'm fairly sure this isn't a bias Vote-Smart's part; every other section of the site has both sides represented where they exist. Since Israel's security isn't (or shouldn't be) particularly controversial among Jewish groups, why do the ADL, AJC, and AIPAC (AIPAC, of all people!) not publish ratings of their own on this matter?
The standard answer is that we don't want, and can't afford, for Israel to become a partisan issue. It's not without merit. Since people vote on many issues, you don't want an election to turn on, say, the economy, and find that you've got a Foreign Relations committee taking campaign contributions from Hamas fundraisers. But I'm pretty sure than abandoning the field to the bad guys is having the opposite effect, and may eventually make Israel a bi-partisan issue, the other way. And I'm not even sure it's a completely honest answer.
By allowing the other side to drive the ratings, you're creating an incentive for one party to seize the issue as soon as they think the bad guys may have some strength. And in a hyper-partisan era, when one party thinks that impeachment is a winning campaign issue, this becomes a real possibility. In the short run, you encourage it to become a partisan issue. In the long run, your friends start to ask why they're supporting you in the first place. That's how politics works.
I think there's also something else at work here, though. I think there's a reluctance on the part of a traditionally Democratic leadership to admit that that party has become the (still uncomfortable) home of anti-Semitism, a la Cynthia McKinney and Al Sharpton. I think they and their largely Democratic membership don't want to face that fact, and the fact that conservative Republicans are now Israel's most reliable supporters, in part because they've been listening to their own press clippings about "theocracy." In the meantime, the actual theocrats are busily enrolling in Yale where they can take a census of gay and Jewish students to see how large the swinging wall has to be.
Further, it's too easy to just write off Republican support as "those evangelicals." Maybe, somewhat. (Evangelicals aren't a majority of the party; they aren't even really driving the agenda.) But if you do that, then you have to explain why you can't carry the Democrats anymore, why you can't appeal to them on their terms, and that's profoundly embarassing, as well.
Either way, the Jewish leadership isn't doing its job here.
For statistical geekery, continue reading below.
Still don't believe there's a difference between the parties?
CAIR in 2005 was either 100 or 0, so it looks as though they only followed one vote in the House. Here's the chart:
| 0 | 100 | |
| Democrat | 49 | 152 |
| Republican | 220 | 7 |
The Washington Report is a pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel publication from DC. Here are (most) of the 2004 aggregates for the House and Senate:
US House:
| 0 | 33 | 50 | 67 | 100 | |
| Democrat | 24 | 7 | 18 | 8 | 102 |
| Republican | 96 | 8 | 10 | 1 | 43 |
US Senate:
| 0 | 50 | 100 | |
| Democrat | 9 | 3 | 15 |
| Republican | 26 | 3 | 13 |
These are so lopsided, I didn't even bother to run chi-square tests. One more, "American Muslims for Jerusalem," from 2003-2004. This is a score, rather than a voting %, so the basic statistics are listed rather than only a count:
| Office | Party | Average | Std Dev | Count | ||
| U.S. House | Democrat | -4.99 | 6.82 | 183 | ||
| Republican | -9.13 | 4.60 | 204 | |||
| U.S. House Total | -7.17 | 6.11 | 387 | |||
| U.S. Senate | Democrat | -1.43 | 3.78 | 14 | ||
| Republican | -5.04 | 3.31 | 23 | |||
| U.S. Senate Total | -3.68 | 3.87 | 37 |
(By the way, the Diaz-Balart cousins, Catholics both, are at -10 and -15, apparently it's not just for evangelicals, anymore.)
Once again, you can run the comparisons if you want, but I think you'll end up with z-scores in the triple digits.
Comments
Palestinians Humiliate Themselves
In a March 16 editorial in the New York Times titled, As If That Fire Needed Fuel, the Times writes:
"Israeli Army officials ordered inmates to strip to their underwear, which many did, marching out with clothing on their heads, an embarrassing and completely unnecessary provocation that trampled the dignity of any Palestinian watching that spectacle.
Given the humiliations that ordinary Palestinians suffer merely by trying to get through Israeli checkpoints every day, the prison raid just reinforced the already degrading reality of living under foreign occupation."
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas stated, “What happened without a doubt is an ugly crime which can not be forgiven and a humiliation for the Palestinian people.”
Palesinians should feel humiliated. A majority of Palestinians living in the West Bank, Gaza, and Jerusalem support suicide terrorism. A 2001 poll by Dr. Nabil Kukali and the Palestinian Center for Public Opinion (PCPO), found, "a substantial majority [of Palestinians] (76.1%) support suicidal attacks like that of Netanya [in May, 2001], whereas 12.5% oppose, and 11.4% express no opinion." A 2006 poll taken by the Jerusalem Media & Communication Center after the recent Hamas political victories found, “56.2% [of Palestinians] strongly or somewhat support suicide bombing operations against Israeli civilians whereas 40.7% oppose such operations.”
Considering that the majority of Palestinians support suicide terror, and considering that Israel prevents suicide killings on a daily basis, it should come as no surprise that captured Palestinians are asked to remove their clothes during the process of incarceration. Why should any Israeli take a chance of being blown up? Why should Israel present Palestinians with opportunities to commit suicide killings? Palestinians should feel humiliated about their culture of death and they should be asked to strip naked during the process of incarceration as long as their population continues to support, condone, and commit suicide killings.
http://whypalestiniansgetitwrong.blogspot.com/
palestiniansgetitwrong@yahoo.com
Posted by: Palestinians are wrong | March 18, 2006 9:40 AM