Bill Kristol spoke to an overflow crowd of our small local chapter of the Republican Jewish Coalition in Minneapolis on Monday night. Under the leadership of chapter president Mark Miller, our chapter has grown from the 38 members at the time of our first event (former Senator Rudy Boschwitz was the speaker) to some 700 today.
I would like to think that the growth of the chapter is a straw in the wind. Rudy was in attendance Monday night. Joining him were such friends of the chapter as Concerned Veterans for America CEO Pete Hegseth and Republican National Committeewoman Janet Beihoffer as well as GOP congressional candidate Tom Emmer, running to succeed Michele Bachmannn in Minnesota’s Sixth Congressional District. I believe that Pete was responsible for persuading Bill to come out to Minneapolis this time around and was his unofficial host at the RJC event.
It was a great event, called to discuss Obama’s disastrous foreign policy. Bill’e presentation was brilliant from beginning to end. Bill not only connected with the audience, he connected a few dots along the way.
Bill spoke at some length about Prime Minister Netanyahu’s speech at Yad Vashem on Sunday evening, which we posted here. Elaborating on Netanyahu’s stubborn analogy of the Iranian threat to the crisis of the 1930’s, Bill took the analogy as a serious portent of action by Israel against Iran’s nuclear program by Israel. Bill would concede that it’s not necessarily so, and one could certainly make a contrary case, but he pointed to a couple of other items of interest.
Bill connected Netanyahu’s remarks to two columns that have drawn little attention in the United States. Bill cited the Ynet column on the negotiations with Iran by Amos Yadlin: “World powers must reject Iranian offer.” Yadlin is the former chief of IDF military intelligence. As one can infer from Yadlin’s column, he is no hardliner. He calls on Israel to adapt its position to the path down which the United States is moving, yet Yadlin finds what are presented as Iranian concessions to be illusory.
Bill also cited the Jerusalem Post column by Yaakov Amidror: “Israel can’t accept the emerging US-Iran accord.” Amidror had a distinguished career in the IDF before serving as Netanyahu’s national security adviser and chairman of Israel’s national security council. He not only knows whereof he speaks, he has been privy to Netanyahu’s thinking on Iran. Looking at the “flimsy agreement” that is looming with Iran, Amidror starkly concludes: “Israel will have to draw its own conclusions.”
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