Congressman King: No Democrat Will Step Up
By Rabbi Yaakov SpivakDaily News
July 2, 2010
The following are excerpts from an interview with Congressman Peter King on my radio program on WSNR.
SPIVAK: What has happened to us that Washington has turned on its longtime friend Israel?
KING: I think you have to be a master psychologist to figure all of this out. Part of it goes back to the Vietnam war to what Jean Kirkpatrick called the “Blame America First” movement. It’s almost a psychological yearning they have to blame America, to ridicule many of our values. When we look around the world, there is no country that is more similar to the traditional United States than is Israel. It’s a democracy; it’s willing to fight for what it believes in, it exists in a very dangerous part of the world. In the eyes of so-called sophisticates we live in the twenty-first century where there is supposed to be a moral equivalency, where no one is really that bad. So Al Qaeda, Iran, Syria, Hezbollah and Hamas are not really that bad. Somehow they believe that it is as bad for Israel to construct apartments in Jerusalem as it is for Iran to construct a nuclear weapon. Israel, therefore, has become a target.
SPIVAK: Why have there been so few Congressman and Senators who have spoken up against the UN Human Rights Council? You are a lone voice in the wilderness.
KING: If there’s one thing that’s sacred among liberal politicians it’s the United Nations Human Rights Council. One of President Obama’s first decisions as President was to have the US join the UN Human Rights Council. Since that time, the UNHRC has issued the Goldstone Report which denounces Israel as war criminals and possibly as guilty of crimes against humanity, when Israel was defending itself against brutal attacks from Gaza. When I said we should pull out of UNHRC to show the world we are serious many politicians backed away. And part of that is pressure from the Democratic Party which feels that such a pullout would be looked upon as a repudiation of President Obama and would also be a repudiation of this liberal dogma that the UNHRC is a very worthwhile organization.
SPIVAK: What happened when you passed around your resolution to pull out of the UNHRC?
KING: I could not get one Democrat to sign on to it.