J Street Poll Also Finds US Jews Support Hitler, Saddam

The J Street survey posited a hypothetical situation in which a man named Adolph Hitler were born in Iowa in 1883, and asked whether the respondents would support him if he decided to change his name in the 1930’s.

Washington, February 12 – Left-leaning advocacy organization J-Street announced today that in addition to showing 84% of American Jews support a nuclear deal with Iran, an even larger number have favorable views of Adolph Hitler and Saddam Hussein.

The highlighted figure was featured in a promotional campaign attempting to show how Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s attitude toward Iran remains out of sync with American Jews’ perspective. However, the question they posed in the poll assumed a deal so safe for Israel that Netanyahu himself would have no problem with it either. In a similar vein, the J Street survey posited a hypothetical situation in which a man named Adolph Hitler were born in Iowa in 1883, and asked whether the respondents would support him if he decided to change his name in the 1930’s.

A separate question asked whether the survey respondents would support Saddam Hussein of Iraq if, in 1991, instead of launching SCUD missiles at Israel, he had laid down arms, withdrawn his forces from Kuwait, stopped oppressing Shiites and Kurds, relinquished his stockpile of chemical weapons, instituted comprehensive democratic reforms, and ceased supporting or funding international terrorism.

To both questions, more than 90% of survey respondents gave a positive answer, with support for the hypothetical Mr. Hitler reaching 98%. The organization says the figures represent a revolution in American Jewish sensibilities.

“The Jews of the United States have matured, and are no longer bound by the traumas of past eras. Who could imagine fifty years ago that Adolph Hitler would be viewed so favorably, even among the non-Jewish population?” gushed J-Street’s executive director, Jeremy Ben-Ami. “It’s also striking how quickly the community overcame any misgivings about Saddam Hussein, a mere twenty-four years after the first Gulf War.”

Ben-Ami emphasized that these survey results, in addition to the answer about an Iran deal, demonstrated how out-of-touch the current Israeli leadership is. “You would never find Netanyahu or his radical right wing agreeing that Adolph Hitler might be viewed favorably, or that Saddam Hussein might be given the time of day,” he asserted. “Yet here we have incontrovertible evidence that one of the most important Jewish communities in the world – I would say the most influential – clearly stands opposed to that intransigence.”

A third poll question asked whether, if France and the European community successfully combated antisemitism and there was a palpable positive shift in Muslim immigrants’ attitudes toward Jews, would they view the Netanyahu government’s encouragement of French immigration to Israel as an important priority or not? Seventy-five percent of the poll respondents rated such a policy “relatively unimportant,” a datum that Ben-Ami also adduces to demonstrate the gulf between Netanyahu and American Jewry.

“He just doesn’t get it,” says Ben-Ami of the prime minister. “It’s as if he’s living in some imaginary world.”