Biden to Amerian Jews: We can't protect you, only Israel can

[Magda Hassan]

Biden to American Jews: We Can't Protect You, Only Israel Can

03.22


5 Comments



Last September, Joseph Biden said the following to a group that included many leaders of Jewish organizations and Jewish officials in the Obama administration:

I had the great pleasure of knowing every prime minister since Golda Meir, when I was a young man in the Senate, and I'll never forget talking to her in her office with her assistanta guy named Rabinabout the Six-Day War. The end of the meeting, we get up and walk out, the doors are open, and … the press is taking photos … She looked straight ahead and said, "Senator, don't look so sad … Don't worry. We Jews have a secret weapon."
I thought she was going to tell me something about a nuclear program. She looked straight ahead and she said, "We have no place else to go. We have no place else to go."
Folks, there is no place else to go, and you understand that in your bones. You understand in your bones that no matter how hospitable, no matter how consequential, no matter how engaged, no matter how deeply involved you are in the United States … there's only one guarantee. There is really only one absolute guarantee, and that's the state of Israel.

In response, reports Jeffrey Goldberg, "There was applause, and then photos, and then kosher canapés."
This is a stunning statement. The Vice President of the United States, a man sworn to uphold and protect the Constitution, which is committed to securing "the Blessings of Liberty" for all of its citizens and guarantees all of its citizens the equal protection of its laws, tells a group of American citizens that the only real protection they have in this world, the only real guarantee of their rights and safety, is not the US governmenttheir governmentbut the government of another nation.
Imagine a sitting Vice President telling a group of Mexican-American citizens that no matter how much they have contributed to the American project, no matter how much they participate in local government or Congress, no matter how critical they are to the American economy, they should not look to the American government to protect them from harm but should instead look to the government of Mexico.
When Malcolm X sought to have the United Nations intervene to protect African Americans from persecutionthe United States long ago having abandoned any pretense of securing rights for African Americansit drew the hostility and attention of the State Department, the Justice Department, and the FBI. But here is a sitting Vice President telling Jewish Americans that they should do a version of the same. And instead of criticizing him, which is how an earlier generation of Jewish Americans would have responded, they applaud him.
http://coreyrobin.com/2015/03/22/biden-t...srael-can/

[Albert Doyle]

Protect them from what? Read Finkelstein. They have a position of dominance and relative safety in America. Surely a group that now enjoys the most powerful lobby in history with unscrutinized support of Israel and the American politics that uphold it is not trying to say that it is suffering any lack of support?

[Magda Hassan]

Actually the actions of Israel do put individual Jews at risk.