Boschwitz's Play for the "Jewish Vote" Costs Him His Senate Seat

By Alfred M. Lilienthal

"It can be proven by fact that the only purely criminal class in America is the Congress."—Mark Twain

The only incumbent senator defeated in the 1990 general elections was Rudy Boschwitz of Minnesota, a longtime supporter of the government of Israel. His successful Democratic opponent was 46-year-old Carlton College political science professor Paul Wellstone. Wellstone, like Boschwitz, is Jewish. However, unlike Boschwitz, whose campaign coffers were bulging with political action committee donations, Wellstone was campaigning on a shoestring.

Nervous nevertheless, Boschwitz authorized a last-minute broadside addressed: "To our friends in the Minnesota Jewish community." The direct-mail piece, signed by 72 Jewish Boschwitz supporters, charged that Wellstone, unlike Boschwitz, had "no connections whatsoever with the Jewish community or our communal life." A reference was made to Wellstone's wife Sheila's Southern Baptist upbringing. The letter also pointed out that the Wellstone "children were brought up as non-Jews" and that the Democratic candidate had served as state co-chairman for the Jesse Jackson for President campaign. All this, the letter declared, was proof that "Wellstone is a disturbing element in American politics."

The Boschwitz letter was a horrendous blunder in a state where religious pluralism and individual tolerance run high. While many Jews found it demeaning, non-Jews began to ask, "Is Boschwitz trying to plant the suspicion that there's something wrong with raising your children as Christians?"

Just as he who lives by the sword dies by the sword, the senator from Minnesota had thrived by pandering to the "Jewish vote." Now he had overreached himself in his effort to appeal to that same vote. This well deserved defeat of Boschwitz was one of the few comforting aspects of the November elections.

Three Zionist Snipers at the Dove of Peace

The American public, by and large, along with much of the world, breathed a huge sigh of relief when President Bush offered to send Secretary of State James Baker on a peace mission to Baghdad and invited Tariq Aziz, the Iraqi foreign minister, to meet him in Washington. However, this surprising and welcome overture, coming directly in the wake of the Security Council resolution authorizing force if Iraqi troops have not withdrawn from Kuwait by Jan. 15, was met with consternation from three likely sources.

Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, the original Israel-firster, who has called for the use of force against Baghdad from the outset as insistently as he had advised the Israeli government early in 1988, at the outset of the intifada, to bar the media and beat the Palestinians into submission "forcibly, brutally and decisively," swiftly reacted to President Bush's move. He told ABC-TV's "Nightline" audience that the presidential action filled him with "foreboding.

"I feel extremely lonely, " Mr. Kissinger said. "I have not been this worried in a decade."

Many years ago, when he was a Harvard University faculty member and a consultant to Nelson Rockefeller, Kissinger was an assimilationist. However, he apparently changed the viewpoint he had held as a college student that creation of a Jewish state "would be a potential and historic disaster." By the time he reached the levers of power in the Nixon administration, he was determined to force the Arabs to accept Israel on Israel's terms. He was responsible for the Nixon pledge, in the 1968 and 1972 presidential election campaigns, that Israel would enjoy military superiority, not mere parity, with the Arabs. Kissinger's current disdain for any move toward a peaceful solution with Saddam Hussain constitutes but the latest exposition of his guiding philosophy, "Israel Uber Alles."

Congressman Stephen J. Solarz, who represents the largest Jewish congressional constituency in the country, also decried the move toward a settlement with Saddam: "I hope and trust this is not the prelude to a Middle East Munich." This was consistent with the career-long approach of this Brooklyn Democrat who, a few years back, devoted an entire issue of a newsletter, mailed to all his constituents at government expense, to the subject of "Delivering for Israel. " In it, Solarz described "the 'behind-the-scenes' story of how, with the help of some of the other friends of Israel on the Foreign Affairs Committee, I was able to obtain an additional $600 million in foreign aid for Israel."

It is little wonder that today nothing short of all-out war to destroy Saddam Hussain and his administration totally would satisfy Congressman Solarz. His incredible double standards were on display last in Congress just last September when, as chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee, he moved to cut off aid to Pakistan for failing to curtail its program to develop nuclear weapons, while at the same time choosing to ignore complaints about the possession of at least a dozen nuclear weapons by Israel, the largest recipient, by far, of US aid. Nor did he discuss Israel's refusal to sign the nuclear non-proliferation treaty.

"I feel extremely lonely," Mr. Kissinger said. "I have not been this worried in a decade."

New York Times columnist Judith Miller has been known to direct her considerable reportorial skills to support the perceptions of some of her co-religionists in the US Jewish mainstream. It was she who printed Solarz's reference to a "Middle East Munich, " after having reported a change of mind by President Bush "in trying to cajole the man he had called 'Hitler revisited'. " Her articles seldom ignore an opportunity to conjure up the Nazi spectre.

Recently, she authored a lengthy book, One by One by One: Facing the Holocaust, based on interviews with European survivors of the Nazi horrors. Describing her book as not about the Holocaust, but "only how it is remembered," Miller readily admits in her preface that "American Jews have a practical stake in keeping memory of the Holocaust alive, as a way of maintaining American support for Israel."

She apparently has a stake herself in incessantly pricking the Christian conscience so as to bring about what, for her and her newspaper, is the correct perspective toward the Middle East conflict.

Undaunted by the prospect of a war in which thousands of Iraqis and her fellow Americans might die needlessly, she, like Kissinger and Solarz, is set on a violent solution. For her, no Holocaust would be good enough for Saddam Hussain or for the Palestinians!

Dr. Alfred M. Lilienthal is the author of What Price Israel?, There Goes the Middle East, The Other Side of the Coin, and his monumental The Zionist Connection.