Charedi Jew Jonathan Rosenblum writes:
Patriotism is an issue, perhaps the defining issue. There is something very different between the visceral love of country that McCain discovered while imprisoned and tortured in another country and the “patriotism” of Obama, defined primarily as working for the enactment of one’s preferred policies or one’s own election (to quote Michelle Obama).
ONE OF THE REASONS Americans were not more impressed with the tumultuous welcome accorded Obama on his rock star tour of Europe was that he presented himself as one campaigning for President of the World. Indeed, Jonathan Freedland of the Guardian has warned ominously that the worlds’ wrath will be directed at the United States should American voters reject its candidate. Obama presented himself to Europeans as one of them, as someone who shares their values and their loathing of our “cowboy” president. Under an Obama presidency, Europeans could drop their reflexive anti-Americanism, he seemed to say.
But there are many Americans who do not see Western Europe as the ideal with which America must be brought into conformity or Europeans as the paragons of all virtue. Rather than fret about America’s “reputation in the world,” as if European opinion polls were the true measure of America, they think it is Europe and the international community that have a lot of catching up to do. In short, they are not impressed by European opinion polls ranking the United States as a greater threat to world peace than Iran or North Korea, and which rate Israel as the world’s number one threat to peace.
Those Americans have no wish for America to follow the path of an aging Europe, whose sclerotic economies increasingly depend on the labor of Moslem immigrants. They are unimpressed by the “sophistication,” upon which the Europeans pride themselves. To Americans that sophistication is another word for cynicism, of which the recent multi-billion dollar gas deals signed by Swiss and Austrian companies with Teheran are a good example. Those countries reprise the role of the Christian arms merchants of the Middle Ages, who sold Moslem armies the weapons they needed to attack Europe.
Above all, those Americans are unimpressed by Europe’s unwillingness to defend itself and its values. Since World War II, the Europeans have been only too happy to subcontract their defense to the United States. European defense spending, as a percentage of the GNP, is a small fraction of the United States. Senator Obama promises to bring the United States in closer conformity with the European model by slashing tens of billions of dollars in defense spending.
Islamists have been given a free pass by Europe in the name of a multi-culturalism that runs only one way. Thus British Home Secretary Jaqui Smith orders terrorist acts committed by Islamists to be described as their Orwellian opposite: “anti-Islamic terror,” because it makes Islam look bad. In Canada, which is a European province in these matters, Dr. Mohamed Elmasry can state on Canadian TV that he supports the murder of all Israelis over 18 and drag author Mark Steyn before numerous provincial human rights commissions for demonstrating Islamophobia by pointing out how unlovely are Elmasry’s sentiments and all those like them expressed in the name of Islam.
