Rightwing Republicans seem to look on Israel as a good wedge issue against Democrats, if only the Democrats would play ball. Yesterday Texas Representative Louie Gohmert was given an hour to rant on the House floor. He warned that BDS was leading to a second Holocaust and then read from a Caroline Glick article calling Peter Beinart an anti-Israel Jew and Max Blumenthal an anti-Semitic Jew. This is almost as laughable as Blumenthal, author of Goliath, recently making the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s top 10 list of anti-Semites and Israel haters.

Go to 3:10:00 or so in the video.

We’re not thinking straight in this town, and there are negotiations ongoing with Iran about nuclear weapons, whose leaders have called us the great Satan that needs to be destroyed, called Israel the little Satan that needs to be destroyed and they have missiles that can put nuclear weapons on top of Israel for its destruction, creating a new Holocaust. Millions of lives could be lost, but as our friend, prime minister Netanyahu points out, they’re building and they’ve created intercontinental ballistic missiles. He’s trying to wake the United States up, Netanyahu is, and he’s saying, they don’t need those to take out Israel. They got missiles to take us out. These intercontinental ballistic missiles are for the United States, they call the great Satan, and its leaders believe that under their interpretation of prophecy from the Koran that the 12th Imam can emerge or will emerge from chaos and they believe it can be nuclear chaos and so by creating nuclear bombs and setting them off Israel, the United States, little Satan, great Satan, they can hasten the return of the 12th Imam to rule over the global — imam to rule over the global caliphate and when someone thinks those thoughts, we need to take out anywhere they’re producing nukes. We have the power and ability to do it and everybody, including Russia and China needs to understand if we don’t take them out they could be launched at Russia and China because they’re led by infidels, in Iran’s way of thinking, just like the U.S. and Israel are to their way of thinking….

And yet as the odds are getting stacked farther and higher against Israel’s existence and as we are demanding Israel give away more of its land, as Palestinian leaders continue to say they’re not agreeing to anything, they’re not agreeing to Israel’s right to even exist as a Jewish nation, as a place where the Jews can avoid another Holocaust like in World War 2, they’re not even willing to recognize that. How can there ever be peace? As I said personally to the Palestinians’ former prime minister, how can you expect peace when you won’t even recognize Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish nation? So they want Israel to keep giving away more and more land and every time, going back to the very inception of Israel, 1,000, 1600, 1,800 years before Mohammed was born, the actual founding of Israel, going back that early, any time Israel has given away land to buy peace, that land ultimately gets used as a staging area from to attack it. And I hope they’re about to learn that lesson.

So what do we have going on here in the United States now? Well, Carolyn Glick has a great article, column one, “The left against Zion.” This is from December 19.

“This week has been a big one for the anti-Israel movement. In the space of a few days, two quasi academic organizations – the American Studies Association and the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association – have launched boycotts against Israeli universities. Their boycotts follow a similar one announced in April by the Asian Studies Association.

“These groups’ actions have not taken place in isolation. They are of a piece with ever-escalating acts of anti-Israel agitation in college campuses throughout the United States.”

And I would interject, it is sickening and incredible to me to see anti-semitism growing just the way it did before the 1930’s and 1940’s when over six million Jews were mercilessly, brutally killed and we’re seeing it arise. When I learned about the Holocaust and when I’ve been to Germany, I’ve learned and read and seen, I could never imagine — thank god we could never have that happen during my lifetime and now I’m watching the seeds of anti-semitism, of anti-Israel, of people wanting to wipe them off the map, of those who are proposing another Holocaust and then we have pseudo intellectual wannabes at universities where they no longer allow true diversity of thought and discussion that made them originally great, which allowed them originally to have liberals there get in charge and now they cut off so often conservative speech. It used to be at universities, even as conservative as Texas A&M was when I was there, we had many liberal speakers. And I enjoyed meeting and debating with some of them. som of the greats in the country. And now even at Texas A&M, they’re careful not to invite people that are too conservative because you don’t want to tick off the faculty senate. Like most universities, have gotten very, very liberal. But in Caroline Glick’s article–

“Every week brings a wealth of stories about new cases of aggressive anti-Israel activism. At the University of Michigan last week, thousands of students were sent fake eviction notices from the university’s housing office. A pro-Palestinian group distributed them in dorms across campus to disseminate the blood libel that Israel is carrying out mass expulsions of Palestinians.

“At Swarthmore College, leftist anti-Israel Jewish students who control Hillel are insisting on using Hillel’s good offices to disseminate and legitimate anti-Israel slanders.

“And the Left’s doctrinaire insistence that Israel is the root of all evil is not limited to campuses.

“At New York’s 92nd Street Y, Commentary editor John Podhoretz was booed and hissed by the audience for trying to explain why the ASA’s just-announced boycott of Israel was an obscene act of bigotry.”

It’s a great article. Don’t have time to read it all. But she points out

“This week, Harvard Law Prof. Alan Dershowitz retired after 50 years on the law faculty. His exit, the same week as the ASA and the NAISA announced their boycotts of Israeli universities, symbolized the marginalization of the pro-Israel Left that Dershowitz represented.

“For years, Dershowitz has been a non-entity in leftist circles. His place at the table was usurped by anti-Israel Jews like Peter Beinart. And now Beinart is finding himself increasingly challenged by anti-Semitic Jews like Max Blumenthal.

“The progression is unmistakeable.”

And people need to wake up and understand, this kind of thing has all happened before. And when people don’t recognize it, it happens again in history. And god help us that it doesn’t happen while our generation is in charge. But as these growing acts of anti-semitism, anti-Israel continue to progress by so-called progressives, making it seem as if this is another apartheid like in South Africa, that was so unfair, racially so wrong in South Africa– it got corrected. This is not the same thing, at all. This is a group of people who have been persecuted throughout their history having a country where they have a longer history of right to that area than any other people existing today. And yet as universities, the so-called left, become more loud and more vocal in their hatred and anger, I wondered, if Iran dropped a nuke on Jerusalem or Tel Aviv, if Iran killed a million Jews in Israel, have those leftists, those anti-semitic, anti-Israel folks at universities, have they gotten so far from decency that they would applaud Israeli Jews being killed by the millions in Israel? I wonder. I wonder if there would be a reaction like there has been in history, like there was in Germany when Jews were being killed. ‘Well, they deserve it, they were the problem in this country.’ Rationalization is a great thing and it’s a dangerous thing. People who were in Germany, who lived through the Holocaust don’t want to talk about it because they cannot believe that they got sucked into that group dynamic that allowed them to be so inhuman and so calloused that they didn’t care about the extinction of Jews in Germany. And I really don’t know the answer, if these anti-Israeli groups in universities that like to think they’re diverse, but yet they come after and destroy anybody that attempts to debate them, would they cheer if Jews and Israelis were killed by Iran? I hope they wake up to what’s happening at these universities. But here again, love of money can be the root of all evil and we see universities across this country getting more and more money from middle Eastern countries that say, hey, and by the way, you need to teach a course on Islamophobia or at least have a seminar, talking about anybody that raises issues about radical Islam…

And yet those kind of things are being talked about and taught at universities. We got to get back to having real debate. Some people think when I get upset, you know, it means I hate somebody. I don’t. I come from a family where we fuss at each other tooth and nail. We still love each other, stand by each other. But as pastor, and I heard it was attributed to Johnson as president, but we had a pastor in Mount Pleasant, Texas, in 1953 that said to my parents, if two people agree on everything, one of them’s unnecessary. Same’s true here in congress. If we all agree on everything, then — agree on everything, then all but one’s unnecessary. We don’t need a congress, we don’t need advisors. One people knows everything, then just let them make all the decisions. But that’s not the case in this fallen world. We need to hear from everybody. Debate’s a good thing. And it used to be on universities and can be again if they’ll allow all voices to be heard.