Barry Rubin
Glenn Beck’s program in Israel went off without a hitch, ending in a rally on the southern side of the Old City of Jerusalem. About 1000 people were in attendance, mostly Americans who’d come to Jerusalem at Beck’s urging but with a sprinkling of Israelis, including a fair proportion of Orthodox.
With the Old City wall’s to his right and in front of him, and the al-Aqsa mosque looming quite close on his right, Beck handled himself with a mixture of audaciousness toward his enemies and sensitivity toward his friends. He announced a global movement, to be headquartered in Texas, to encourage average people to act against injustice though the details of its scope and goals weren’t clear.
While many fulminated against Beck and his Israel project it was hard to find something he specifically said or did that should provoke such feelings. For example, a presentation on the history of Jerusalem was careful to cite Jewish, Christian, and Muslim connections with the city in a very balanced manner, as the call for prayer wafted from a nearby minaret. Beck’s mission was to raise support for Israel and the 1500 viewing parties around the world—including such places as China and Pakistan—guaranteed that many heard the message. He is seeking to reverse the trend in which “sophisticated folk,” my phrase, sympathize with terrorist groups and revolutionary Islamist organizations rather than a democratic state defending itself.
While listening to Beck I realized what a pity it is that so few people who should be doing so analyze him fairly, which doesn’t mean uncritically. On one hand, Beck is very much in the Protestant moral revival tradition of America. He could have been a preacher and indeed he is partly that. While often dubbed, as one reporter remarked at the event, “a raving lunatic,” in part, too, Beck is a voice of relative sanity in a society where much of the mass media and universities has come under the control of people who, beyond their elegant phrases and superficially impressive credentials, better deserve that label.
Aside from his view that Christianity cannot exist without Judaism, that the Judeo-Christian heritage is a lynchpin of Western civilization, and that the divine being loves the Jewish people and favors them having a homeland in this land, I think what attracts Beck to the Israel issue is that its demonization so well exemplifies the upside-down craziness of this era. And Beck also knows something about what it’s like to be demonized.
Sitting there in the audience I came to a better understanding of what Beck and his movement is about, not only in regard to Israel but in a broader sense as well. What Beck and the Tea Party most epitomizes might be called the post-reactionary conservative and religious right. Such people have accepted many things that their counterpart’s decades ago fought against. They are anti-racist, tolerant, willing to accept equality for women, and even equal rights for gays as people (though not necessarily gay marriage).
In contrast to the past authoritarian-oriented right, they believe the power of the state has gone too far. Historically, liberals represented a more liberty-oriented agenda, yet today those who call themselves liberals are statists, supporting more restrictive laws and regulations, stronger central government, higher spending and bigger debts without end. What makes things especially troublesome is the fact that these laws, spending, and bureaucracy really aren’t doing much good except for those who gain government employment, contracts, or corporate bailouts from the federal budget.
Thus, whatever his silliness—much of which is really comedy or taunting his adversaries—Beck and his supporters, including the Tea Party, are not some new Klu Klux Klan, apologists for big business monopolies, Nazi party, or whatever. They are a new phenomenon reacting to new and very changed conditions. They are not trying to roll back American society to a pre-civil rights’ era but to prevent it from entering a statist, anti-patriotic, bankrupt era.
To many readers here, all of this is relatively obvious. Yet roughly half of the American people have heard none of this. In some cases, those purveying the idea that Beck, and the conservatives, and the Tea Party, and the Republicans are dangerous loonies believe it. Some are cynically manipulating images from the past in people’s heads to manipulate them into supporting the current ruling group and ideas.
At the Restoring Courage event, for example, at one point in his speech, Beck remarked that a congressional committee didn’t end Jim Crow (the system of discriminatory laws, especially in the South, against African-Americans. The American reporter sitting next to me gave a little snort of derision and said out loud, “But a congressional committee did end Jim Crow!” He quickly wrote it down. Ha! Beck had said something stupid and inaccurate, you could almost hear him thinking. Now, I’ve got him!
Of course, Beck’s point was that it was a Civil Rights movement composed of grassroots’ individuals, and with a largely religious-oriented leadership, that has change America. Sure, Congress came in and passed laws yet that was the end of the process. Yet as in various dealings with Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachmann, Rick Perry, and people like Beck and Rush Limbaugh, the mass media was only looking to discredit or even demonize.
“With friends like these…” said a Jewish journalist, leaving unsaid the rest of the phrase, “you don’t need enemies.” The reporter continued, “Beck is hurting us,” meaning Israel and the Jews. But how? My joke in response was, “We wanted to get Noam Chomsky instead but he’s too busy organizing an anti-Israel rally.” Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow, and such people would certainly be welcome in Israel if they wanted to defend Israel’s right to exist and to defend itself. But they aren’t interested in doing that.
One of the main points Beck made in his speech is the bankruptcy of much of the “human rights” industry which has been hijacked into giving a pass to regimes that are the biggest violators of human rights. He noted the double standards used against Israel and many other points that could easily—and should have been—the staple arguments used by liberals.
It is very hard for many Jews in America—many Israelis are more bewildered than hostile about these American battles—to comprehend the change. As a sympathetic Israeli observer put it, “Two thousand years of persecution makes one rather suspicious.”
Yet for a variety of reasons there has been an important shift in conservative circles. Despite such old-fashioned hostiles as Pat Buchanan and Ron Paul. The reasons for this require an article in itself but include perceiving common enemies; admiring Israel as a nation-state that defends itself, and a trend in Evangelical Christianity appreciating their religion’s Jewish roots and being ashamed of past antisemitism.
These changes are real. But those Jews who isolate themselves from contact with these people and get their information from the mass media are not going to discover it.
Beck praised Israel and the Jewish people at great length, avoided sensitive topics, provided a religious narrative of tolerance and one that should be acceptable to Jews, and announced he would be going to South America to urge community and religious leaders there to support Israel. After the event I ran into a friend and said to him: “Do you think they’ll believe now that Beck is really pro-Israel?” We both laughed knowing that this was unlikely.
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