My colleague Sheya, director of PalinTV, presented Mrs. Palin with the ArtScroll edition of Perek Shira, a commentary on the song of celebration sung by Jewish women during the exodus from Egypt. Mrs. Palin received the Hebrew volume with obvious delight; she has used the biblical Book of Esther as bedtime reading material for her eight-year-old daughter, Piper. She wants Willow to emulate Esther, Jewish history’s great heroine, who risked everything to save the Jewish people from Haman’s plan for genocide [bold mine-DL].

Although 65 years have passed since the Holocaust, the threat of genocide still hangs over the Jewish people — and again from Persia. Iran openly threatens to wipe Israel off the map. Hamas, with its charter calling for the extermination of the Jewish State, fires rockets at Israeli schoolchildren. Syria races to build chemical and biological weapons to use against Israel. Mrs. Palin makes it clear that she recognizes these threats to America’s ally, Israel, and wants to end them. She minced no words in her remarks to the Pennsylvania Family Institute, criticizing the Obama administration for “coddling our enemies while abandoning our treasured ally, Israel.”

On her lapel, she wore a pin showing the American and Israeli flags intertwined. ~Benyamin Korn

How Willow Palin is supposed to emulate Esther under the circumstances is anyone’s guess. Is Palin proposing that her daughter be married to Khameinei in order to thwart Ahmadinejad? Then again, the entire Ahmadinejad=Haman equation is simply nonsense, not least since Ahmadinejad and the Iranian government are in no position to do anything to Israel without suffering massive retaliation. For that matter, Iran’s own Jewish population remains unharmed.

What I found interesting about Korn’s account of yet another exercise in conservative ecumenism is that Palin used the venue of this Pennsylvania Family Institute to circulate more of her tired, bellicose rhetoric and outright lies about the administration’s foreign policy record. Maybe it’s because I was just married not far from the city where this event took place, and I have a strong impression that Palin’s militarism has little or no support in that part of the state, but there is still something jarring and irritating about such an avowed militarist such as Palin engaged in her usual fearmongering in front of an audience including Mennonites and Amish. It doesn’t make sense to affirm the need for strong families and stable communities in one breath and then urge on confrontational policies that will produce family-shattering, community-destroying wars in the next, and the fact that these two diametrically opposed positions are often held by the same ostensibly conservative political leaders mostly emphasizes how much their commitment to the former is conditional and highly selective.