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From: dxa@bentley.UUCP (DR Anolick)
Newsgroups: net.politics
Subject: Re: Our 51st state?
Message-ID: <564@bentley.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 20-Aug-85 08:10:20 EDT
Article-I.D.: bentley.564
Posted: Tue Aug 20 08:10:20 1985
Date-Received: Fri, 23-Aug-85 04:56:23 EDT
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories, Piscataway
Lines: 74

In the year that I have been on the net, I attempted to read net.politics
twice before now.  Once when I first had access to the net, and once when
an article was cross posted to a newsgroup which I do read.  Both times I
stopped reading after a few weeks of trying to wade through all the garbage.

Well, here I am, reading again, and this time I decided to add my views and
opinions.  Hopefully I'll be able to keep up with the discussions here with
enough time left over to do some real work.  Anyway, here goes:

> > >  After all, there are  approximately 40 million Jews worldwide.
> > >  [Don Black]
> 
> >		A standard claim of those who assert the holocaust never
> >		existed.  Nobody has ever been able to find 26.5 million 
> >		of those Jews.  [Oaf]
> 
>     OK, fine.  How many Jews are there in the world today?  According to this,
> then, there are only 13.5 million Jews.  Somehow, this doesn't jive. According
> to a 1980 census, there were 5,781,000 Jews in the United States, or about
> 2.5% of the population.  This calculates to approximately 7,719,000 (+ -) Jews
> in the rest of the world, including Israel.  If there really are only 13.5 
> million total, as your figure indicates, why,then, is the US government such a
> strong supporter of the Israeli?  Why is the Isreali State being given such a
> disproportionate amount of foriegn aid, loans, and outright grants?  It would 
> make far more sense to side with a billion Moslems and a billion Christians.
> [Don Black again]


Since I am at work, I don't have figures available to me, but the claim of
13.5 million Jews in the world seems a lot closer to the truth than 40 
million.  Mr. Black implies that since 2.5% of the U.S. is Jewish, 2.5% of 
the world should be Jewish.  Does this mean that if 75% of the U.S. is white, 
that 75% of the world is white?  Somehow Mr. Black's logic does not seem valid.

Using the figure above, there are 5,781,000 Jews in the U.S.  Someone please
correct me if I am wrong, but I believe that there are approximately 3 million
Jews in Israel.  To round things off a little, that would leave about
4.5 million Jews in the world.  To me this is a reasonable figure.  Especially
when you consider that most European Jews where either murdered or displaced 
by the holocaust, there are very few Jews in Oriental nations, and most
Jews living in Arab countries moved to Israel after its formation.  Therefore,
the 4.5 million figure could easily be correct. 

So as Mr. Black asks, why IS the United States such a strong supporter of
Israel.  Well, to quote President Reagan, "Israel is, of course, a major
strategic asset to the United States.  When we support Israel's security
we in fact support our own."  

Israel remains one of the few stable, reliable democracies in the world
upon which the U.S. can rely to uphold Western interest.  Iran and Lebanon
are good examples of the inherent instability of the mideast, but Israel
is the exception, and has been for the past 37 years.

Israel supplies the United States with a constant stream of information 
on the performance of the latest U.S. weapons systems.  And Israel shares 
with the U.S. intelligence on sophisticated Soviet equipment.  This vital 
information is not available from any other highly reliable source.  I 
imagine that the strongest supporters of Israel in our government can be 
found at the pentagon.

Mr. Black raised the question as it is always raised.  Why does the U.S. 
support so few Jews when there are one billion Moslems?   In which case
I ask, why do we support England, when there are so many Chinese?  
Shouldn't we therefore be China's staunch ally, after all there are so
many of them.  The answer is obvious.  Allies need to have more than
just numbers to be a benefit to the U.S.  They need to be reliable and
useful.  Israel has proven to be both.
-- 

	Droyan				David Roy Anolick
ihnp4!bentley!{droyan|dxa}		^     ^^^ ^^

"Why are you here?" 
"To fight for truth, and justice and the American Way."