Core Values, Key Questions and Our Mission

Have you noticed a decrease in your JINSA Reports of late? We’re about to make up for it. Over the past few weeks we have had the opportunity to participate in Jewish voter education programs around the country, providing our insights into defense and security policy to audiences in Cleveland, Detroit, Denver, Chicago, Pittsburg and elsewhere. As the Russian comedian used to say, “What a country!”

Have you noticed a decrease in your JINSA Reports of late? We’re about to make up for it. Over the past few weeks we have had the opportunity to participate in Jewish voter education programs around the country, providing our insights into defense and security policy to audiences in Cleveland, Detroit, Denver, Chicago, Pittsburg and elsewhere. As the Russian comedian used to say, “What a country!”

We learned at least as much as we taught. The first was the answer to the often-asked question, “Why a JEWISH Institute for National Security Affairs? Why can’t we drop the ‘Jewish’?” Aside from the odd acronym it would produce, there are, in fact, JEWISH core values that we apply to the issues at hand.

To borrow from another speaker, security at home; Israel/Zionism; anti-Semitism; and the war against terrorists and the states that harbor and support them must be the Jewish priorities in 2004. Others share them, of course, and JINSA has many, many members who are not Jewish, but without these at the top of the Jewish priority list Jewish life here and abroad, Jewish culture and the Jewish state are threatened with extinction.

Domestic, social, and economic policy can only be important to the extent that we exist as a free and secure country, and the war at home is part and parcel of the war abroad. Ed Koch gets it. The former NY mayor is a lifelong member of one political party and claims never to have voted for a member of another major American political party. This time, he says, there is only one overriding issue – “They’re trying to kill us!” – and that issue will determine his vote.

There is a further uniquely Jewish element to this equation. Never in the history of our people have we been so safe and so successful and so well integrated as we are in the United States. The Golden Age in Spain had nothing on the 350 years we have spent in America. This is in fact, as our grandparents said, the “goldene medin” (the golden land). And as we live in America and love America, we owe it to our country to protect America as it has protected and continues to protect us so we all can thrive.

That would seem to put JINSA right in the middle of the game – right where we like to be. Our mission has always been to educate our members and others about the threats facing our country and our allies; to explain why a mobile, technologically superior military is vital to America’s security; to provide leadership on issues affecting American national security and foreign policy; to explain the importance of US security cooperation with like-minded democratic partners; and to explain the key role Israel plays as an outpost of liberty, a linchpin of stability and a friend and ally of the United States.

Key questions – coming up. We will be asking about Iraq and how it is doing; WMD and who has it; the USA Patriot Act and its utility; Israel and its political/military requirements; anti-Semitism and how to fight it; the draft and who wants it; the war and how to win it; Iran and its nukes; and always, why Jews should make these questions and their answers their chief priority as election day draws nearer.