"Jew York". In NBC News's coverage of 9/11 today, a report by Richard Engel (who is probably Jewish) said that New York City remains a high priority target for Al-Qaeda. Reasons given include that it is the media and financial capital of the world. (Some people in Europe, in London in particular, might want to challenge that.) Not one word is mentioned about the massive presence and influence of Jews in New York City, a fact reflected by the nickname that heads this piece. Wikipedia says:

New York's Jewish population in 2001 was approximately 1.97 million, 1.4 million more than in Jerusalem but 600,000 less than in Gush Dan, Israel's largest metropolitan area; however, Tel Aviv proper (non-metro/within municipal limits) has [a] smaller population than the Jewish population of New York City proper, making New York the largest Jewish community in the world.

But the fact that New York is the largest Jewish city in the world plays absolutely no role in its being specially targeted by Al-Qaeda, right? Wrong.
+
The Mayor of New York is Jewish. The media of New York are shot-thru with Jews, the great preponderance of whom are Zionist or Radical Zionist. The New York Post, tho owned by the Catholic Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, could not be more rabidly Zionist if it were published in one of the renegade "settlements" in the West Bank. New York-based media constantly select Jewish 'Middle East experts' to interpret events for the rest of us. Can we trust Jewish commentators to be neutral and truthful, even if the truth hurts Israel? I can't.
+
Reverse the premise: if the great preponderance of 'Middle East experts' invited onto media discussions of Middle Eastern affairs were Moslems, would we trust the neutrality of their evaluation of Israeli behavior? Yet we see almost nothing BUT Jewish "experts" on the Middle East on American media. These media have sent Jewish reporters into Iraq and other predominantly Moslem countries. Can we really trust those reporters' or those media's view of all things Arab? I can't.
+
Politically, New York's Congressional delegation is heavily Jewish, headed by Charles Schumer of Brooklyn in the U.S. Senate. Are New York's Jewish Members of Congress pro-Israel, anti-Israel, pro-Arab, anti-Arab, neutral, silent? I suggest they are for the most part outspokenly pro-Israel. Does that produce special animus for New York on the part of Islamists? Yes, it surely does.
+
New York is not, of course, the only part of the country that sends Jews to Congress.

... 87% of the Senate is Christian (compared with 79.8% of the population) and
13% of the Senate is Jewish (compared with 1.4% of the population). According to
the data, no Senator falls under the category "No Religion/Atheist/Agnostic" — a
category embodied by 15.0% of the U.S. population according to the 2001 Census.

In the last Congress (for some reason the website that gives that breakdown has no such data for the present Congress), 37 members of the House were Jewish, representing 6.9% of the total, nearly five times (493%) the proportion of the general population that is Jewish. That proportion is based on a figure of 1.4% of the U.S. population being "Jewish", which may mean "practicing" or "religious Jews". The most liberal use of the term "Jewish" yields at most a count of 2.2% of the U.S. population being Jewish. That would mean that 6.9% of Congress represents over 3X (313%) the number of seats that Jews could be expected to hold by random distribution. By comparison, Catholics are 'over-represented' in Congress by a scant 4.3% (total proportion 104.3% of their ratio in the general population).
+
How, exactly, these terms are defined makes some difference religiously but not necessarily politically. The Catholic Church counts as "Catholic" only people who are enrolled in a parish or who attend church regularly. Self-identified "Catholics", like me, may not be the slitest religious (like me), and there is no Catholic equivalent to Zionism. Catholicism aspires to universalism. It is not tribal, claims no "sacred ground" for Catholics alone, and does not demand war to defend that "sacred ground" against "enemies". By contrast, heavy pressure is put upon even nonreligious "Jews" to identify as Jews and do everything in their power to protect Israel and advance Zionism. The very least required of "Jews" is that they not favor, by word or deed, the termination of the Zionist experiment by abolishing the State of Israel and merging it into a multi-ethnic and multi-religious, united Palestine.
+
Thus even liberal Jews in media and Congress toe the Zionist line. They may criticize the war in Iraq, and even 'excessive' measures taken by Israel — such as crushing (to death) an American peace protestor under a bulldozer going forward, then rolling over her again in reverse — but they must never so much as breathe the barest suggestion that the whole idea of Zionism was insanely wrongheaded from the start, and has proved a catastrophe, so must now be not merely rethought but undone — with apologies and reparations.
+
Quite the contrary, American Jews, religious and nonreligious alike, are a constant and essentially united pressure group that demands the United States take whatever measures may be necessary to preserve Israel, even if that should involve wars against Syria, Iran, even Saudi Arabia, in addition to the war against Iraq. Even the criticisms of Iraq policy do not condemn neutralizing Iraq as a threat to Israel, but essentially say only that the instability created by the Iraq invasion has made the Middle East more dangerous, not less — meaning, more dangerous for Israel. If Iraq were destroyed as a threat to Israel, thru the successful installation of a pro-Zionist Iraqi government, all the death and destruction visited by the United States upon Iraq would be just fine with the bulk of American Jews.
+
Ask yourself: If New York City were merely the largest city of the United States, headquarters of the United Nations and of many media and financial operations, would it still be Al-Qaeda's No. 1 target? I don't think so. But Americans in general are never to think that. And, most especially, Americans are never to think, for even a microsecond, that New York would never have been attacked at all, except for U.S. support of Israel.
+
(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 3,774 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 9:23 PM