After Romney visited the Western Wall in Jerusalem last month and planted a prayer in a crevice, I promised to put up video of it. Well here it is at last. Him going to the wall.
At the beginning you’ll see Ann Romney get out of the SUV. At 1:15 or so you can see Dan Senor, Romney’s neocon aide, standing there like a proud father. At 3:50 and 4:00 or so I ask Romney whether Israel has a right to annex the West Bank. You can see the perfectly coiffed candidate ignoring me. (I asked him a third time on his way back, even closer; another video, maybe later). Near the end there’s a little dialogue offcamera between me and Senor about how many times Romney has been to Israel (I failed to say, Occupied East Jerusalem).
What a swarmy and pretentious creep. Totally ignored your very coherent question while saying thanks to someone who said “God bless you”. Puke fest.
Interestingly enough, I saw a video where Dan Senor spoke about Israeli high-tech.
He was basically stating that Israel is so creative that even Silicon Valley pales in comparison(he didn’t mention massive help from the diaspora, specifically from America, capital rushing into Israel. There are more venture capital firms in Israel than all of Europe. Not because Israel is that much better, but because that’s where the key Jewish venture capitalists are telling everyone to go. Name me the last time you heard of a major Israeli startup? A few smaller ones get bought and that’s it).
Nonetheless, what fascinated me was the way a lot of these right-wing Jews have essentially a split personality. MJ Rosenberg joked on Twitter that they were ‘passing’ in front of their white, gentile Republican friends as something they are not.
I rememeber a commentor here on MW who stated that he (or she, I don’t remember) had gone to College with Senor and remembered him. He was a liberal throughout much of the time but then he met some Zionist who made a big impact of him(sort of reminds me of the way Jodi Rudoren described the settler leader Dani Dayan in the NYT recently in gushing terms ‘worldy.. secular, wine and art collector. She couldn’t get enough of his pro-Apartheid charms!).
And I was thinking this in the back of my mind as he started to babble on in generalities about why Israel was so much better and then he said a funny thing. He mentioned immigration and said that Israel is a far more open country to immigration.
I started to laugh, out loud, but because of that I missed his facial expression. So I re-winded the Youtube video to that timemark and looked carefully at his face, his eyes. Not even a hint of a bullshitting. Then again, Senor was the propaganda man to the U.S. press corps during the Iraq civil war so lying is 2nd nature to him. He’s a natural.
And I thought this was funny because America has a race-blind immigration policy because America is a liberal democracy.
Israel isn’t a liberal democracy; Israel is an ethnocracy with a strong Apartheid element.
Thus, Jews are only allowed to immigrate with ease. Non-Jews are only given short term work terms(e.g. maids from the Philippines etc) and many of them are even forced to write under contract where they swear not to impregnate Jewish women as ‘not to endanger the Jewish character of the state’.
And I was thinking to myself; is Senor even aware of this schizophrenic argument of his? Just a few days ago, I read in JPost that Israel will now not even give the African asylants a fair documentation process. They’ll be deported without trail or jury. The massive detention centers where they are put – indefinitely without access to any lawyer – are already close to finished.
And secondly, what is Israel’s immigration rate of those who are allowed to actually stay? In the lower thousands. America has the highest immigration(legal and illegal) per capita of all the major countries in the world.
So I’m thinking to myself, as Senor then went on to defend America’s generous immigration system and said he warned his conservative friends of ‘nativism’, that here is a man defending an Apartheid state attacking his GOP friends for subtle and mild racism(let’s leave aside if he was right or wrong to attack them for racism, I think immigration is a fair topic as far as it’s debated in a levelheaded fashion), while he himself was promoting a state with a strong Jews-only immigration policy.
Question: would Dan Senor support a white-only immigration policy to America on the basis of ‘preserving the white character of the nation’? My guess is not.
Jews fought hard against the immigration act of 1923, finally upended in 1965.
Senor, who spent his formative years being a classic liberal, is invoking that heritage when he recounts how he cautioned his conservative friends. He’s coming at them from a liberal position. But that’s America.
Israel is another category alltogether.
Here’s a guess: if not for Israel, Dan Senor would never ever join the GOP. He’d be a centrist Democratic(since he’s pro-Wall St) but on all social issues he’d spend his time on the media cable networks attacking the GOP as nativist, racist etc.
But Israel changes a man like him in so many ways. It’s just like the alliance between the Jewish establishment and the far-right Christian evangelicals. These groups have nothing in common on most domestic issue but Israel changes the entire equation.
So is Dan Senor ‘passing’ as MJ Rosenberg suggests? It would seem so.
But he’s also, in a way, confirming an anti-Semitic stereotype, namely that of the ‘dual loyalty’ (or in this case it’s more like ‘dual standards’) where he uses the white supremacist argument for the U.S. (only white immigration for racial reasons) but applies it to the Jewish state. While he at the same time attacks that very argument, only this time for America, the same argument he supports when it comes to Israel.
The only difference; one state is majority European(although slipping fast) and the other is majority Jewish.
Yet the ethnic composition in one state makes all the difference for Senor and his liberalism flies out the window. Where have we seen this movie before…
What a creepy freak show. It’s like he’s arriving to ordained.
Talk about a Manchutian candidate, He also looks a Stepford husband.
Stay strong Phil. You gave it your best shot. It looks like you got as close as possible to him. He probably didn’t know who you are, so he rudely considered you as lacking importance/credibility. It was a reflection of his character or lack thereof that he wouldn’t answer a rapidly evolving foreign policy question that he will have to deal with if God forbid he’s elected.
I have a feeling, Phil, you maybe sitting Shiva in November when the weird Mormon wins this thing. Maybe it will be good for the Jews and Muslims. Outraged “progressive” journalists can malign the latter day saints. I can see a joint effort between Phil Weiss and Andrew Sullivan: feel the hate in Salt Lake City.