Elliott Abrams and 'Neocon-ing' Obama

[grassfed]

For the eight years of the Bush-II administration, a key behind-the-scenes architect of U.S. strategy in the Middle East was Elliott Abrams, a neoconservative whose devotion to Israel is hard to overstate – and who is now engaged in what looks like a PR campaign to bend Barack Obama’s Mideast policies in the direction favored by Israel’s hard-line Likud government.

However, unlike many neocons, Abrams has been surprisingly frank about his devotion to Israel as a Jewish state. He has even expressed resentment toward Christians who hold nuanced views about Israel or who show sympathy for the Palestinians uprooted from their ancestral homes.

In 1997, Abrams published a book entitled, Fear or Faith: How Jews Can Survive in a Christian America, which explained his strong commitment to Zionism; chastised Jews who marry Christians; and lashed out at American Christians for what he regarded as their insufficient support for Israel. “Where Catholics and mainline Protestants still fall short is in their failure to understand the relationship of most Jews to Israel,” Abrams wrote. He singled out a 1990 statement by the United Church of Christ that Abrams asserted “was remarkably ungenerous when it came to Israel.”

Abrams cited a passage in the statement in which the Protestant church expressed sympathy for Jews who had suffered centuries of persecution but also noted disagreement among its members about whether Jews had a special claim on the Holy Land because of the supposed covenant with God described in the Jewish Torah (the first five books of the Old Testament). “We appreciate the compelling moral argument for the creation of modern Israel as a vehicle for self-determination and as a haven for a victimized people,” the United Church of Christ statement said, before tempering that sentiment with sympathy for Palestinians.

“We also recognize that this event has entailed the dispossession of Palestinians from their homes and the denial of human rights,” the church statement said.

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2009/121709.html