The following letter is posted with the permission of the author: Mr. Baer——It is really a lot simpler than you make it. The key is  point #6 'Jews Who Hate Israel.' Since Jews have been the driving force in the Left for over a century, and still are, that is not an insignificant 'one of eight' point. In the United States today secular Jews disproportionately influence fields like the law, academia, and the press—— that are heavily Jewish. Those, in Lenin's terms, are the 'commanding heights' of modern society.

Look at the Democratic party. Largely funded by Jews, its presidential candidates are falling all over themselves to find Jewish relatives, and isn't it interesting that almost all the ones without them... are already eliminated.?

Add to that the astonishing almost organic effort by secular Western Jews to disappear as a culture and a religion by intermarriage and fragmentation into cults from 'Kabbalah' and Moonies, to the 'Buddhists' (who do you think all those Hollywood 'Buddhists' were who were giving money to Clinton?)... as noted in Eliott Abrams' brilliant and troubling book...as well as any frisson in the culture from alien abduction to veganism. Forget Jerusalem. Secular Jews are now obsessed with 'trivial pursuits.' Hitler would be so pleased.

As Chesterton put it, 'If you won't believe in God, you will believe in anything.' And it isn't just a problem of secular Jews. As you point out the mainline Christian institutions are aligned with the anti—Israeli Left. Of course please note these churches are emptying faster than they can find signatures for petitions supporting the 'oppressed Palestinians.' Ironically as these two remnant fragments of great cultural traditions ally on the Left... they join in their irrelevance to the future.

What we are facing is a degenerative branch of a great culture that is actually and tragically committing suicide. It favors politics that would destroy the true heart of its own culture and religion—Israel — as well as harbors of traditional culture and political realities like the United States that reflect traditional Judaeo—Christian values. The existence of both appear pretentious to these post—modern 'black riders' ——— as if there was any point in epistemological questions of truth and reality as opposed to something 'real' like  winning a specious tort case, or pushing the latest environmental fad, or cheating an artist out of his royalties.

The Clinton Administration enthusiastically embraced the shyster values of this degenerative culture, just as it appointed so many of its members to office and pardoned others. The Bush Administration returns in the nick of time to traditional Judaeo—Christian values.

But the greatest danger to Israel isn't the decay of the diminishing Left—leaning Jewish population in the United States. It is the sentimental inability of the aging Israeli Ashkenazim to give up the Marxist delusions of their youth. Marxism is part of the DNA of Jewish culture at this point... a sort of Tay—Sachs syndrome of the soul. And it is the bleak economic future this offers Israelis that will destroy Israel. Sharon is very possibly guilty of the bribe scandal underway. Why not? Almost every other top—ranking Israeli of all parties including the sanctimonious Peres has had to steal to make a living there.

So now we are in the process of destroying the most effective leader Israel has had in a generation who has been able to hold the factionalism together long enough to positively affect US and Palestinian policy.

But confining brave members of one of the most commercially successful peoples in history inside a socialist hell and asking them to fight for it, is perhaps the greatest danger to Israel there is. And now they are leaving... .

And if they leave... where do they go that favors the continued well—being of the great Judaic tradition?

—Thomas Lipscomb

Reponse by Richard Baehr:

I agree with what you have written.  I believe that Jews have made it much easier for non—Jewish leftists to hate Israel. The Jewish left in both Israel and the United States have been an immensely naive and self—destructive force. However, there are non—Jewish leftists (intellectuals, media, academics), and greens, and muslims, who would hate Israel regardless of the fact that they have Jewish allies in the cause. 

The attitudes of Europeans towards Israel, has much more to do with their fear of their own growing, angry, unassimilated Muslim populations, than it does it to any Jewish vanguard against Israel. 

The movement of the Democratic Party to the multicultural, relativist left (e.g. the Democratic Senators who trashed Daniel Pipes in hearings on his appointment) is also not a Jewish phenomenon. If anything, I think (and hope) that some Jews are gradually coming to  their senses about the nature of the two parties and their attitudes on Israel. I see this greater openness particularly in younger Jews in America. As intermarriage, and secularism hollow out the overall numbers, the Jewish core that remains is more traditional, and more resembling of Christian believers, than Jewsh secularists. I think more Jews are realizing that it is not Christians who are hijacking planes and crashing them into tall buildings.