Z STREET

Lori Lowenthal Marcus of Z Street
NYTimes photo

A tip of the chapeau to Judy B.

The New York Times has an article in today's edition, “Jewish Votes in Play”   citing a recent Gallup poll about the alleged steadfast support of likely American Jewish voters for President Obama in the 2012 election:

. . . a new Gallup poll shows that Jews are no more disillusioned than other Americans are with Mr. Obama. According to the poll, his Jewish support has declined since the election in 2008 — but at a rate no different from that of Americans as a whole. Even with that drop-off, 54 percent of Jewish voters told Gallup in August and September that they approved of the job the president was doing (compared with 41 percent of American voters overall). In fact, Jews continue to be far more enthusiastic about Mr. Obama than other Americans — a 13-point difference that has remained sizable throughout the president’s term.

President Obama is playing the “Jupus” card in his 2012 re-election campaign trolling for Jewish votes and money.  Jupus is a neologism defining the persistent attachment of predominately liberal American Jewish voters to Democratic candidates in Presidential and Congressional elections.  This is best captured in the fabled comment about this political science phenomenon by the late essayist, Milton Himmelfarb: “Jews earn like Episcopalians but vote like Puerto Ricans”.

The creator of the term "Jupus," Dr. Charles Jacobs of Americans for Peace and Tolerance of Boston defines it thusly.

In Lupus, an auto-immune disease, the body’s cells that are normally used to fight off external infections, have their function somehow inverted, and they begin to attack the host body itself.

In Jupus, the special inborn Jewish intelligence, provided by the Lord to help Jews survive on a hostile planet, especially perhaps to ward off dangerous anti-Semitic assaults, reverses its function and attacks the host Jewish community. It appears that the more advanced the intellectual gifts, the more extreme the disease, as in the Chomskyite strain. In its more common form, it is associated with simple leftism – a Jewish adaptation to persistent assault involving an attempt to submerge the attacked Jewish identity by adopting a universalist posture. On the religious plane, this is plainly observable in the growing phalanx of those who seek to substitute leftist ideals for Torah Judaism, a “we’re here to help the world” dodge -- Tikkun Olam uber alles, as it were. These can be appropriately described as “Tikkunistas.”

Let see how Obama is using Jupus in his re-election effort.

Yesterday, I walked into my synagogue in Florida’s Panhandle and asked our secretary where our new rabbi was? The answer, he was on a conference call with hundreds of rabbis across the country with  President, Barack Obama. That spoke volumes about the desperation within the Obama campaign.  After the  'earthquake' of the NY9th Congressional District  special election GOP victory, the Obama re-election team was jolted and redoubled efforts to keep liberal Jews close by invoking Jupus. This was a desperate move to prevent losing several hundred thousand Jewish voters in key battleground states distressed over the Administration’s faux Israel policy, hence the Wednesday speech at the UN General Assembly and the meeting and joint statement with Netanyahu on the return to the fiction of bi-lateral negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. Those disaffected Jewish voters  in the suburban Philadelphia  community of Bala Cynwd cited in a related  New York Times article, “Fear Gnaws at Liberalism” included  Z Street co-founder, Lori Lowenthal Marcus.  According to Richard Baehr of The American Thinker those disaffected American Jews are likely Romney voters in 2012.

The Palestinians basically think they have all the cards for a UN General Assembly vote, but have a US veto staring them in the face at the UN Security Council. They will follow the strategy capsuled in the alleged fabled Taliban comment: "you may have a watch, but we have all the time."  That is why PA President Mahmoud Abbas will stride confidently to the podium this morning and in the words of Turkey’s Islamist Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, “plant a flag at the UN” with his unilateral declaration of an ‘imaginary’ Palestinian state.  Their strategy is aimed at exposing Obama as not being a fair mediator and selling out both them and the restive Arab Muslim ummah. Dumb move on Obama's part after pandering to all of the Palestinian demands and isolating Israel. That is the opinion of Emanuele Ottolenghi, Brussels-based senior fellow of the Foundations for the Defense of Democracies, who commented in an interview to be published in the October edition of the New English Review:

If the Obama Administration is forced to use its veto once again on this issue what it comes down to is that despite all of his efforts, President Obama will be presented and described in the Arab world as the President who twice in his tenure used a veto to defend Israel against what Arabs perceive to be their fundamental and undeniable rights.  It is a move designed I think, more than anything else, to embarrass the US Administration and to make the case that the Palestinians are trying to make that the US is no longer a reliable mediator.  The Palestinians’ bottom line is to undermine 40 years of international diplomacy in the Middle East which were based on UN Security Council Resolution 242.  A resolution which sets the parameters for peace making in the region, the principle of land for peace through negotiations.  By going to the UN and asking the UN to proclaim a Palestinian state under borders that a Security Council Resolution will define, the PA is trying to alleviate itself from the duty and the burden of negotiations.   It is basically trying to push aside America as the principal mediator in that process.   Whatever way you look at it beyond the procedural issues this is a clear and clever ploy to corner the US and put the current Administration in a bind.  If they stand by their commitment to veto a resolution by the Security Council to recognize Palestine as a state the US standing as a mediator will be further undermined in the public opinion and among the governments in the Arab world. Of course the entire peace process will collapse as a consequence of this.

Yesterday, we posted on the newly formed National Conference on Jewish Affairs that has organized activities and protests at the 66^th session of the UN General Assembly in Manhattan this week.  The co-founders of the NCJA include Dr. Herb London of the Hudson Institute, Lori Lowenthal Marcus of Z Street and Beth Gilinsky of the Liberty Alliance.  These American Jews are not afflicted with Jupus. They see clearly through the diaphanous veil of President Obama’s failed policies towards Israel, our only reliable ally in the Middle East of the tumultuous Arab Spring.  Dr. Charles Jacobs in a phone call this morning   talked about his attendance at yesterday’s Durban Watch counter conference in Manhattan that I watched via a PJTV webcast. Jacobs said that he was pleasantly surprised that  a number of NCJA chapters have sprouted up across the country. So, are a lot of us, me included.  If those are realized and are joined by dozens more  the co-founders of the NCJA can thank pioneers like Ha’Emet -The Truth in Orange County, California, the Jewish American Affairs Committee of Indiana, Boston’s Russian Jewish Community Foundation and the JCCWatch.org in Manhattan.

May a hundred chapters of the NCJA bloom. They are the antidote to Jupus. They are in the vanguard of concerned American Jews seeking to thwart an Obama re-election in 2012.