February 4, 2013 – By Bruce Thornton of Frontpage Magazine

After watching Chuck Hagel’s embarrassing performance in his confirmation hearings, I can’t decide if he’s a bigot, a paleocon isolationist, or just plain stupid. I suspect the latter, given his statement, “If confirmed, I intend to know a lot more than I do.” More significant is the fact that he was nominated at all, given his record of gaffes, his use of anti-Semitic tropes like “Jewish lobby” (used only once “on the record,” he assures us!), his indulgence of the genocidal Iranian regime and its nuclear arms ambitions, and his endorsement of American guilt and global retreat.

But the most important dimension of Hagel’s foreign policy beliefs is his obvious distaste for Israel, evident in a catalogue of public statements over the past decade. He has consistently indulged the specious moral equivalence that refuses to acknowledge Arab hatred of Israel and Palestinian terrorist violence as the root causes of the conflict, refused to support condemnations of Palestinian terrorism and terrorist organizations, blamed Israel for lack of progress in the so-called “peace process,” and decried the malign influence of the “Jewish lobby” on American foreign policy. Yet all these positions are ones with which Obama is comfortable. That’s why he nominated such an unprepared, inexperienced blowhard to run the Pentagon.

Obama’s hostile attitude towards Israel, though, is part of a much larger phenomenon: the decades-long demonization of Israel by Western democracies far in excess of any condemnations of the slaughter, ethnic cleansing, torture, invasions, and occupations that have marred the 65 years Israel has fought to survive against a surrounding fanatic enemy whose collective population outnumbers hers 30 to 1.

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