The Perfect Zionist's morality lecture on Biden is full of holes

Those that behave illogically cannot use logic to convince their adversaries, so instead they resort to moral finger whagging.

Readers of the Times of Israel Blogs (TOI Blogs) probably are aware of one of the more successful non-Israeli writers on the platform, the Lebanese Canadian Fred Maroun. For many years his posts have often been successful and shared in explosive bursts. At one point I was a fan of Fred's and would correspond with him both in comment threads and by private message. I even interviewed him in 2018 on my YouTube channel. He used to pretend to care what people of different viewpoints have to contribute to discussions of the Middle East, and probably would insist to this day that he hasn't changed but rather he's recognized some flaws that previously he ignored. In other words, he was never wrong, but everyone he disagreed with was and he was too nice to point it out.

Fred's latest article is called "Right-wing Zionist attacks on Biden expose right’s moral failings", and it's much needed today. After all, isn't the public conversation missing a self-styled middle-aged atheist liberal Zionist condemning traditional conservative Zionists as immoral cynics and bigots for supporting a candidate based on his record on their most important issue? If you are not reading into the sarcasm, Fred's entire article could be read in the voice of Bill Maher; a spokesperson for liberalism as it was in the 1990s while ignoring the fact that the world has moved on. Self-identified liberals have largely abandoned the fights against free speech, endless war, and state tyranny and have embraced their closest ideological partners: the neo-conservatives. Their biggest mistake is to think that conservatives have not moved on from the Bush era of world policing and moral grandstanding. Reading through Fred's article, it is eminently clear that he has just as little insight into the thinking of American voters and Jewish Americans that support Donald Trump as he does into Israeli politics. 

Let's also be clear on one thing. I do not identify as a "right-wing Zionist" or any type of Zionist for that matter. I did my military service in Israel, and despite my disappointment in the experience have no regrets about spending almost three years in the effort to protect my family and their country. But Zionism means literally nothing anymore. It is laughable that people that support the uncompromising hold on all territories controlled by Israel since 1967 as well as those calling for either the return of all of those lands for peace or the creation of a bi-national state can both call themselves "Zionist". It doesn't help that all sorts of enemies of Israel or "peace activists" also use the term as an epithet for people they despise. Unlike Fred, I have never taken up the mantle of "Israel advocacy". My own personal positions, including opposition to foreign aid on practical grounds, make it impossible for me to fit in with almost any subgroup within the advocacy spectrum. But nevertheless I will address Maroun's article point by point to show how irrational it is.

1. Wavering on "moral positions" shows a lack of conviction, not a conscience

Fred Maroun cannot denounce "right-wing Zionists" on moral grounds when he himself wrote an article on why he is "no longer an advocate for Israel". In that article he faulted Israel's leaders for acting in the nation's best interests as opposed to his ideal for peace. He states in the article that he opposes the Israeli settlements, as he does in plenty of his other articles. But only months earlier, he wrote an article titled "Jews should be able to live wherever they want to live" and specifically includes Judea and Samaria as a place where the Palestinians reject any Jewish right to reside.

2. Sore losers' preaching comes off as whining

Like many within his centrist liberal camp, Maroun seems to only embrace democracy when the votes go his way. In reaction to the 2016 US election and the Brexit referendum months earlier he continually made statements that the voters were wrong and that the the latter should be reconsidered in a second referendum. With regards to Israel, Maroun has continually expressed his displeasure at the continued survival of Benjamin Netanyahu's governments. He was very confident prior to the April 2019 Knesset election that Netanyahu would be toppled, and therefore up to that day he penned articles such as one claiming that "support for Israel is all about support for human rights". But immediately in the wake of the election and reports that Netanyahu's Likud Party had been filming Arab Israeli polling centers Maroun began to shift. 

• He demanded that Netanyahu offer an apology "and more" to Israeli Arabs on April 11.
• On May 8 he endorsed the joint Israeli-Palestinian commemoration of the Day of Remembrance where terror victims and terrorists are jointly mourned. 
• He then wrote an article kissing the feet of Sarah Tuttle-Singer, a far-left TOI editor who had previously smeared Maroun as a sexist and whose fans viciously attempted to deplatform him. 
• By June 11 he wrote an article called "It is time for Israel to end the occupation". 
• This was a guy who had in 2018 written an article called "Yes, I had fun in Israel while Palestinians were getting killed in Gaza". Fred also wrote an article in 2017 titled "We Arabs are damn lucky that Jews do not behave like Arabs". But supposedly we are his moral lessers because we won't support his candidate.

3. The moral standards only apply to people Fred doesn't like.

In the new article on Biden, Maroun takes aim at the Jewish critics of our former vice president and backers of current President Donald Trump. But he is on such shaky ground that it almost looks comical, because of his naked appeal to morality often based on dubious hearsay and innuendo.

• He cited the allegation that Donald Trump kept a book of Hitler quotes by his bedside table. What he neglected to mention was that this only came up in the context of his ex-wife Ivana Trump's 1990 divorce and an interview with Vanity Fair. Supposedly Mrs. Trump, originally from Czechoslovakia, found this morally repugnant and necessary to bring up, but in 2008 she married her new husband Rossano Rubicondi at Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort. There is no other corroboration that Trump stored the speeches in his bedside table and read them. But supposedly divorce allegations are enough for Fred Maroun.
• Maroun calls Trump unethical, because within the American legal system he has weathered successful a plethora of legal attacks from emoluments to impeachment since becoming president. But Maroun has never in any of his articles discussed the successful finding of obstruction of justice against Justin Trudeau in the SNC-Lavalin Affair or the more recent WE Charity scandal that threatens to topple his minority government.

4. The pro-Israel actions that Fred Maroun characterizes as "failures" and symbolic are anything but.

What is so ridiculous about this statement is that the three examples he cites are exactly what both multiple Israeli administrations and the traditional pro-Israel organizations in the United States have asked for.

Jerusalem

• Regarding the moving the Israeli embassy, Maroun scoffs that it was within the Green Line. This is a breathtaking moving of the goal posts. No one has ever asked that the building be built in East Jerusalem. The fact of it being within the limits of the city is the fulfillment of past US administrations to move the embassy to Israel's capital. As Peter Baker of the New York Times reported only days after Trump's election, both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush had promised such a move and hadn't delivered. Barack Obama, the president that Biden served as VP, fought any legal measure to recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital or even the listing of birthplaces for US citizens as "Jerusalem, Israel". 
• Baker's article in 2016 was meant to bring doubt that Trump would follow through. Maroun's response to this was that Biden would not reverse the embassy move, but that's as if to state passive lazy support is equal to tangible action. 

Iran

Maroun attacked Trump's cancellation of the JCPOA (Iran nuclear deal) by not properly gathering international support for it. 

• But he ignores the fact that Iran was proven to be engaged in "ongoing violations" the deal according to those signatories, and yet nevertheless they refused to support enforcing it by reimposing sanctions.
• The JCPOA, when enacted under Barack Obama, had been shepherded through Congress through the duplicity of Secretary of State John Kerry and weak-willed GOP legislators like Senate Foreign Relations Committee chair Bob Corker who changed rules of the committee in order to allow it to pass without a majority. Even Democratic minority leader Sen. Charles Schumer (NY) opposed it. It enabled Iran to experience an economic windfall that led to its further domination of satellite states like Syria and Maroun's native Lebanon as he has stated in his own articles. The international community is more than aware of this, yet for some reason according to Maroun it is Trump's fault that they would not reimpose sanctions on Iran.
• Thanks to the US backing out of the JCPOA, European trade with Iran has fallen, including German-Iran trade being reduced by 49% in 2019. This is no thanks to the EU leaders including Angela Merkel that prioritize appeasing Iran and keeping the deal in place regardless of its violations.

Aid to the Palestinian Authority

Regarding the stopping aid to the Palestinian Authority, Trump is accused by Maroun of not getting other nations to follow suit. This is once again spitting in the well of kindness. The Taylor Force Act was introduced and passed by the GOP-controlled Congress in 2017 and then passed by both houses by 2018 as an amendment before being signed by Trump. 

• Far from being symbolic, the law revoked US foreign aid to the PA until it ceases paying stipends to the families of deceased and convicted terror operatives through the Martyr's Fund and is named after US Army veteran Taylor Force who was murdered in 2016 by a Palestinian from the West Bank. This murder was praised by all major factions of  the Palestinian Authority, including the ruling Fatah Party of President Mahmoud Abbas. 
• It doesn't matter what the other nations have done, because it was thanks to this president and both parties that supported it that the bill that it was passed. It was during Joe Biden's visit to Israel in 2016 where he expressed "overwhelming frustration" with Netanyahu that Force was murdered. 
• This is an example of Donald Trump making sure that US dollars are not used to support acts of terror, but curiously Maroun is holding him responsible for other nations not following his lead. Yet as VP Biden made no public effort to urge Congress or the president to support a similar measure.

Forgetting something?

Two of Trump's policies regarding Israel are overlooked in Maroun's article. . . perhaps because they are ones that are pro-Israel that he may not support:

• Recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the disputed Golan Heights in 2019 in a ceremony at the White House with Netanyahu and various Jewish administration officials, Trump broke with over 50 years of US foreign policy. 
• Changing US State Department policy in 2019 to dispute the statement that Jewish settlements in the West Bank are illegal under international law.

4. Democrats of today vs. Democrats of fantasy

Fred Maroun harps on the positives of Joe Biden, because he still clings to the fantasy that the Democratic Party can remain the one that he has supported. He states that there are 228 pro-Israel Democratic members of Congress, and only four members of "The Squad": Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib. This demonstrates his gross ignorance of the wider Democratic caucus. Like those he is criticizing, he only focuses on The Squad because they are new.

•  In February Minnesota Rep. Betty McCollum, a 20 year veteran, called the Israel lobby a "hate group".
• Many members of the Congressional Black Caucus have had ties for years to Minister Louis Farrakhan, the deeply anti-Jewish leader of the Nation of Islam, a black nationalist religious group. When he was a senator from Illinois Obama was photographed grinning with Farrakhan and some of these politicians during an actual CBC meeting in 2005. Among those listed in 2018 are representatives Maxine Waters (D-CA), Al Green (D-TX), Danny Davis (D-IL), Yvette Clarke (D-NY), Keith Ellison (D-MN; now Minnesota attorney general), Gregory Meeks (D-NY), Barbara Lee (D-CA) and Andre Carson (D-IN). The "Farrakhan caucus" as it should be called forms an additional seven persons if one includes Ilhan Omar who replaced Ellison.
• Several Democrats in the Congressional Progressive Caucus including Reps. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) and Mark Pocan (D-WI) have attempted to prevent "division" within the Democratic caucus by pleading with majority leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD) not to bring pro-Israel resolutions such as one condemning the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement for a vote. The CPC is a 95-member bloc in the House of Representatives.
• As of this writing, we do not even know who Biden's running mate will be. If 

Some would ask what difference it makes if these members of Congress and Senator Bernie Sanders are hostile to Israel when the president has wide latitude on foreign policy and the GOP caucus can join with the Democrats to support Israel. What they forget is that Biden needs to get elected first. And in order to get elected, before he negotiates with Israeli and Palestinian leaders he must negotiate with his own party how to earn their support. While he did win the party's primaries, that victory was largely thanks to CBC leader and veteran power broker James Clyburn (D-SC). Black Caucus constituencies will be essential to him getting crucial voter turnout in districts heavily populated by black residents in states like Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. 

Among those are the districts held by Omar and Tlaib who are currently facing their own primary battles. Should they survive those fights, Joe Biden will have to at least offer them something in public. The influence of pro-Israel Democrats is on the wane with the defeat of Eliot Engel in New York's 17th congressional district in favour of the anti-Israel progressive Jamaal Bowman. Illinois' Dan Lipinski also lost his campaign in March in favour of the  anti-Israel progressive Marie Newman. The vast majority of these districts are safely Democratic. Simply put, the Democratic caucus' problem with Israel and Jewish supporters of it is already way beyond just the membership of The Squad, and it is growing and will continue to grow. Joe Biden will be counting on the help of all of these people in order to get elected, so who is Fred Maroun to count on 228 members? The true number is unknown and is probably much lower. It is a given that part of drafting the Democratic platform, Biden will have to broker a deal with these anti-Israel progressives or risk a schism that could jeopardize his candidacy.

Maroun then goes on to equate pro-Trump Zionists to Rashida Tlaib for refusing to endorse Biden and desiring the entire land of Israel. One wonders whether he learned his powers of persuasion from France's Vichy government who convinced their terrified citizens that genuflecting to the Germans would be preferable to resisting regardless of whatever humiliations they would suffer.

5. No one elected David Frum

In appealing to "right-wing Zionists" Fred concluded by citing one of the most interesting so-called conservatives opposing Trump: former George Bush speechwriter David Frum. What he forgets to mention is that President Bush is uniquely loathed among those of my generation, Jew and gentile alike, as the lying scum responsible for the Iraq War, the Patriot Act, and failures on nearly every front of domestic policy. In 2018 during a Reddit AMA as senior editor of The Atlantic, Frum ducked every question from the audience about his role in promoting the Iraq War. Also in 2018 he engaged in a debate with former Trump strategist and nationalism advocate Stephen Bannon, in which Bannon was judged to have won the vote initially before the results were inexplicably blamed on a "glitch".  The official results held that the vote for each debater remained unchanged at the end of the debate, an outcome that would mean that literally no one who attended found that they had changed their mind.

One of the reasons for Bush's failure is that he hired Frum, who at the time was a Canadian citizen and is strictly a neo-conservative. He is widely credited with crafting Bush's "axis of evil" speech, even though he tries to deny it (see video), but has never clarified what went into the decision to incorrectly describe Iran, Iraq, and North Korea as a bloc as the phrase implies. Is there any other way to describe him other than a warmongering weasel? As a Jewish American who grew up at the time, Bush's decision to enter the War in Iraq based on fabricated evidence compelled me to abstain from voting in my first election in 2004, since both major candidates had voted for the war. I only regret that in 2012 I was convinced to vote for Mitt Romney, who took the same tired world policing position as Republicans before him. As a supporter of Israel, I can state emphatically that Bush's decision, supported by David Frum, has made defending US foreign policy toward Israel much more difficult thanks to almost universal recognition apart from navel gazing moralists like Frum and supporters of him like Fred Maroun. Gallup tracking polls have consistently shown that Americans view the decision to enter Iraq as a mistake for every period since 2006. 

In matters of war-and-peace and economics, Frum is a dependable ally of defense contractors and corporations, not of the broader American public on the right or left. It is unfortunate that many often lump him in with anti-Jewish conspiracies about Iraq, but there is no reasonable person who would cite him as a leading thinker in American conservative thought. Unlike most GOP voters, Frum in 2012 wrote a CNN Op-ed supporting gun control, meaning it is he and not Trump who is against the Republican/conservative consensus. The same year he came out in favour of reducing abortion by increasing welfare benefits. Again, whatever your opinion on abortion, this is as not conservative of a position as one can take. Being a conservative in America is about more than supporting war on false pretenses in order to expand American hegemony overseas. Fred Maroun's conflation of David Frum with conservatism stems from his erroneous perception that the term means the same thing everywhere. As a former member of Canada's far-left New Democratic Party who has never hidden his contempt for anyone of deep religious faith and conservatives in general, Maroun lacks any insight into what right-wing politics means, whether economic or social. 

6. Joe Biden is a disaster no matter what side of the spectrum one looks

Democrats want to cite Joe Biden's fifty year career in public office as a plus, but his record says otherwise. On many issues he has taken positions that either his own Democrats or both parties would disown today.

Segregationists and busing: He has shot himself in the foot by bragging about how he used to have good working relationships with segregationist Democrat senators Herman Talmadge and James Eastland in the 1970s. Talmadge in particular saw blacks as inferior to whites. Could anyone imagine the reaction to Donald Trump saying that and not being labeled a white supremacist? Biden also opposed forced busing to integrate public schools in the 1970s because of how he felt it would cause children to learn in a "racial jungle". The quote was used against him by primary rival Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA), who may be his vice presidential nominee.

Gay marriage: In 1996 Biden voted in favour of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) that restricted marriage to heterosexual couples and defended the vote in 2006 on NBC's Meet the Press.

Criminal justice and race relations: Then Sen. Biden was the architect of the Violent Crime and Law Enforcement Control Act of 1994, commonly known as the "Clinton Crime Bill". Shepherded through two Democratic controlled houses of Congress, the crime bill included an assault weapons ban that angered gun rights activists, but also fed what is now called the "mass incarceration crisis" according to the American Civil Liberties Union. In June 2019 even the New York Times highlighted his rhetoric of the period ("Lock the SOBs up") in order to dispute his assertion that he was not deeply involved in its drafting.

In May he was confronted on his record on these issues during an interview with radio host Charlamagne tha Gd, and delivered his notorious remark that "if you're having a hard time deciding between me and Trump, then you ain't black!" Even black Democrat supporters of Biden were outraged and responded by claiming he was taking black voters for granted.

7. I disagree with Trump too, but it's about the issues

Another policy that Maroun completely ignores is the effort by Mr. Trump to fight campus anti-Semitism, including an executive order that would seek to investigate them as civil rights violations for universities under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. I opposed the EO, and still do, on the grounds that I do not believe it will effectively combat anti-Jewish bigotry or any other form of bigotry to involve the federal government in the context of speech. In my conversation with Fred in 2018, I even mentioned that I oppose deplatforming of BDS supporters through legal maneuvers, a measure that he supported. As someone who experienced direct verbal abuse over my Jewish religion in college under Obama and Biden, I know that this is a problem. It was a major inconvenience under them, and it continues to be today, but I was rational enough not to blame Obama about every time a friend or colleague directed a nasty remark my way. I disagree with Trump about the solution, yet it is abundantly clear to anyone with a lick of honesty that his decision demonstrates more than just a "symbolic gesture" against anti-Semitism since it could involve legal consequences for anti-Jewish student, faculty or administrators.

As a civil and economic libertarian, I break with the pro-Israel community on issues of freedom of speech and censorship as well as foreign aid to Israel. I have for years supported a truly independent Israel that would not be tethered to the whims of the occupants of the Oval Office and Capitol Hill. That's me, but the reality is that unlike Fred Maroun I can recognize that my beliefs form a niche view. Rather than impugn the moral character of my audience and throw a tantrum at the president, I hope to swing more people to my side by demonstrating how the status quo is unsustainable. I wrote last year what I call the "Independence Manifesto" in order to demonstrate that it cannot continue, and cited the defeat of US Rep. Eliot Engel (D-NY) as an example of how the AIPAC model of Israel advocacy is over.