Opinion: It’s Not Rush Limbaugh Who Should Apologize, Foxman Has “Chutzpah”

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norman-podhoretzBy Norman Podhoretz

In my new book, Why Are Jews Liberals?, I argue that it no longer makes any sense for so many of my fellow Jews to go on aligning themselves with the forces of the Left. I also try to show that our interests and our ideals, both as Americans and as Jews, have come in recent decades to be better served by the forces of the Right. In the course of describing and agreeing with the book the other day, Rush Limbaugh cited a few of the numerous reasons for the widespread puzzlement over the persistence of liberalism within the American Jewish community. And while discussing those reasons, he pointed to the undeniable fact that for “a lot of people” – prejudiced people, as he called them twice – the words “banker” and “Wall Street” are code words for “Jewish.” Was it possible, he wondered, that Obama’s attacks on bankers and Wall Street were triggering a certain amount of buyer’s remorse within the American Jewish community, which gave him 78 percent of its vote?

Finally, taking off from my observation that many Jewish liberals like to call themselves independents, he wondered whether a fair number of the self-described independents who deserted Obama and voted for Scott Brown might actually have been Jewish liberals. If so, he concluded, Brown’s “victory could be even more indicative of an even bigger change in the political temper of the country than has so far been recognized.”

For this, Rush Limbaugh has been subjected to a vile attack by Abraham Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League. Of course, Mr. Foxman has a long history of seeing an anti-Semite under every conservative bed while blinding himself to the blatant fact that anti-Semitism has largely been banished from the Right in the past 40 years, and that it has found a hospitable new home on the Left, especially where Israel is concerned. This makes Foxman a perfect embodiment of the phenomenon I analyze in Why Are Jews Liberals? Now Foxman has the chutzpah to denounce Rush Limbaugh as an anti-Semite and to demand an apology from him to boot. Well, if an apology is owed here, it is the national director of the Anti-Defamation League who should apologize for the defamatory accusation of anti-Semitism that he himself has hurled against so loyal a friend of Israel as Rush Limbaugh.

{Commentary Magazine/Matzav.com Newscenter}


14 COMMENTS

  1. Foxman is a liberal jew who thinks he represents judiasm by yelling anti semite to anyone who opens his mouth. Rush said some smart things when he was wondering why jews tend to vote so liberally. Rush also said that he believed that some of these liberals might start feeling “buyers remorse” now that they see how their savior is being knocked down by the masses who dont believe in him anymore.

    Foxman, in his quest for acclaim, is always on the look out for someone he can yell about no matter what the situation. Well guess what foxy, your the liberal bum hes talking about! Stop yelling so much, your supper is getting cold.

  2. What a great story! Norman Podhoretz knows his stuff!
    Rush was simply pointing out whats going on and standing up for the Jewish community. For some reason all the anti-semites I have encountered have been liberals or aligned themselves with liberals. I am a proud Jewish conservative as are many of my friends. We need to stop have a particular political affiliation simply because it is a tradition. Its obvious now with BHO in office, liberals are not friends of Israel.

  3. To #3 We’re not JUDGING him,I’m sure he suffered unimaginable pain.However he just has the wrong basic hashkafik values that we stand for.PERIOD!!! This doesn’t mean we dont love him like a brother,just he shouldn’t be representing jewish values if he has the wrong ones. nebach

  4. From caring for the poor to having good middos, Rush represents the antithesis of any true ben torah and yirai shamayim. It is simply a chilul Hashem for any jew to even be associated with him.

  5. Many people who emerged from the Holocaust have done good and helped resurrect the world of yeshivos snd Torah in America and elsewhere, but others have done evil, and used their experiences to do evil in the world, Foxman included. Many survivors of the Shoah have anger towards G-d and the Torah and sadly, the liberal Jews have attempted to replace the living truth and immortality of the Torah and mitzvos with Holocaust memorials, and the shtus of liberal/secular Jewish culture, all of which cannot and will never replace the beauty and timelessness of Torah Judaism. We have a very bright future ahead of us, while the non-Orthodox fail and will eventually intermarry and assimilate themselves into oblivion. I liken these people to Korach- they want to replace Toras Emes with whatever ideas are all the rage from academia and the annals of Democrat/Secular Humanist-Atheist circles. We have more to fear from the Liberal Jews than we do from righteous, Israel-loving Christians.

  6. to number 3

    Whether or not someone went through the Shoah does NOT give them carte blanche to falsely accuse someone of making “borderline anti-semitic” comments.

    Second, you should check Foxman’s personal history. He did not “go through the Shoah.” He was given to the family’s maid as an infant (he was about 6 months old) when his parents were ordered to the ghetto. He was baptised and raised Catholic by the maid and spent the war as any other Polish Catholic child, not even knowing he was Jewish until the war was over and his parents returned to reclaim him.

  7. Rush and the ADL [Michael Ledeen]

    Norman Podhoretz quite properly takes Anti-Defamation League czar Abe Foxman to task for insinuating that Rush is somehow a Jew-hater for wondering if Jewish voters are having buyer’s remorse regarding Obama. They certainly should, both because of Obama’s striking nastiness to Israel and of his attacks on “greedy bankers” (which Rush mentioned), free broadcasting, and of course the crusade against American medicine, all enterprises in which Jews have long flourished.

    Rush should be a hero to Foxman and American Jews, but they are so blindly partisan that they can no longer distinguish between their friends and their enemies. Foxman has relentlessly attacked American Evangelicals — arguably the most pro-Jewish and pro-Israel people in America — but conveniently disappears when the government goes after real Jews for presumed “dual loyalty.” Which, one might say, is the core principle of the ADL.

    Foxman wants Rush to apologize. Nuts. I want Foxman retired and replaced by somebody who fights for Jews and our friends.

  8. Rush has been a constant friend of the Jews and of Israel. For those who remember his early days on radio, he spoke of his oldest childhood friend who he described as a father of 10 kids who studies Judaism. This fellow brought Rush to Israel and gave him a foundation to understnad what goes on in our Jewish worlde. I think Rush knows the “truth”, the distinction between Torah True Jews and our values and those, nebech, who have conterfeit Jewish values. He questions only because he is saddened that so many of us have bought the messianic illusions of the left.

  9. I urge everyone to contact Abraham Foxman
    demanding he retract his inaccurate statement.
    By making such a ridiculous charge, he
    disqualifies himself as an objective arbiter
    on issues involving defamation. Foxman should
    consider retirement.

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