Israel Lovers Buy Newt

Yesterday's New York Times article on Sheldon Adelson's campaign contributions to Newt Gingrich illustrated my concerns in the previous post about American Jews whose first love is Israel.  It appears that Adelson's main reason for supporting Gingrich is that Newt is a 100% supporter of Israel.  Earlier articles said that the main bond between Adelson and Gingrich was Newt's anti-union stance, but that hardly seemed worth $10 million or more.  Newt's support for Israel is a better justification for the campaign contributions. 

The article says that Adelson, who was born in America, did not get the Israel bug until middle age, but once he got it, he really got it.  It's not surprising that Adelson supports Israel, per my earlier post, but I don't know why Newt is such a fervent supporter of Israel.  Why should America base its entire foreign policy on a relatively small country?  I doubt that he subscribes to the evangelical Christian ideas about the importance of Israel for the endtime.  Newt is not Jewish, but I'm guessing that he likes all the financial and political support that the gets from Jews for espousing pro-Israel policies.  Jews have wealth and political influence far exceeding their proportional representation in the American population. 

It sounds as if Newt is willing to send thousands of young American gentiles for fight and die in Iran, because Israel feels threatened by Iran.  This from a man who was a draft dodger during the Vietnam War.  Ironically, Newt's father was apparently in the Army infantry, but Newt had no intention of following in his father's footsteps.  Although there were many reasons for the US invasion of Iraq -- 9/11, Bush II's love/hate relationship with his father, massive intelligence failures -- one was certainly the Israeli/Jewish desire to get rid of Saddam Hussein, who in the first Gulf War had fired Scud missiles into Israel.  There was enormous Jewish pressure to attack Iraq, led by prominent Jews such as Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz.  Israelis were not willing to invade.  In fact, few American Jews enlisted to fight Iraq, but rich Jews paid to have poor, gentile rednecks fight there. 

Of course, now that it has come out how unjust the American income tax system is, it looks like rich Jews did not really pay that much to the rednecks.  They just got Congress to support the war, and the gentile middle class fought and financed Israel's war on Iraq.  Thank you Joe Lieberman, Carl Levin and your many Jewish political colleagues.  Of course, ironically for both Israel and the US, the Iraq War may have ended up strengthening Iran, thus further endangering Israel, rather than protecting it.  Iraq never really posed a threat to the US. 

I'm not sure, but Jews may perceive Mormons as less obsessed with Israel than other Christians, perhaps even as somewhat anti-Semitic.  Therefore there could be a Jewish movement for anybody but Romney, with Newt currently the most feasible not-Romney.