Hagel doesn’t accept 100 percent of the neocon foreign policy program, so he is a vile human being at whom career-destroying epithets will be thrown, over and over again. Interestingly, Richard Haas, who heads the Council on Foreign Relations, in a rare public rebuke criticized senior fellow Elliott Abrams as “over the line” for his “anti-Semite” smear of Hagel.
But as usual, and with thanks to Robert Wenzel, Ben Stein takes the cake. If you support the nomination of Hagel, you are indifferent to the incineration of millions of Jews:
You really cannot, in fairness, blame President Obama for naming “Chuck” Hagel, one of the most clearly anti-Israel, anti-Semitic members of the Senate (or ex-members in his case) to be Secretary of Defense. President Obama has not changed his views on Israel since his first speech at the Democrat convention in 2004, when he made it clear that his sympathies in the Middle East lay with the Palestinians. In a way, you have to admire his consistency. Of course, he has to pay lip service to Israel when he visits Miami Beach, but how he must laugh at the audiences that applaud him….
I hope the people who are supporting Chuck Hagel know that by confirming him, they are cementing at 100 percent that odds that Iran will get a nuclear capability without U.S. interference. Whether Israel can survive an Islamic bomb is questionable at best. This means a vote to confirm Mr. Hagel is a vote that expresses no interest in whether Israel survives.
There isn’t any evidence that Hagel is anti-Semitic, but everyone in American society knows there doesn’t need to be. This is simply how the game is played. If you don’t adopt the party line on the Middle East, you obviously “hate Jews.” Republicans who play this game are the worst hypocrites of all: they can’t protest loudly enough when Democrats accuse them of “hating minorities” because they (in theory, anyway) oppose affirmative action. But as soon as they can play the “hate” card on their own enemies, they do so with glee.