Palin’s apparently eschatological comment doesn’t appear to be an accident. The Charlotte Observer reports that she’s taking dinnertime advice on Israel from the Graham family:

The former Alaska governor and 2008 GOP vice presidential candidate told Billy Graham about how she came to faith in God as a girl in Bible camp.

She quizzed him on the presidents he’s known and wanted his take on what the Bible says about Israel, Iran and Iraq, Franklin Graham reported.

The Rev. Billy Graham is a credit to this country, and has for all of his life eloquently melded evangelical Christianity with a civic-mindedness and a broadmindness that have appealed to people of all faiths and no faith. (He apologized for an unfortunately antisemitic comment with President Nixon that was caught on tape and recently released.) Franklin Graham is a much different story. A Christian Zionist leader, Franklin has described Islam as “a very evil and wicked religion” and suggested erroneously that the Christian God and the Muslim God are two different deities. He even asked President Obama on the campaign trail if he was a Muslim. And unfortunately, Billy Graham is not long for this world, so if Palin is trying to yoke herself to the Grahams, then she’ll be palling around with Franklin more and more.

“I disagree with the Obama administration on that,” Palin told Walters. “I believe that the Jewish settlements should be allowed to be expanded upon, because that population of Israel is, is going to grow. More and more Jewish people will be flocking to Israel in the days and weeks and months ahead. And I don’t think that the Obama administration has any right to tell Israel that the Jewish settlements cannot expand.”

Uh, more and more Jewish people will be flocking to Israel in the days and weeks and months ahead? Does Palin think the end times, heralded by the ingathering of the Jews, is nigh? In reality, Jews are immigrating to Israel at a fairly historically low rate.

J Street’s Jeremy Ben-Ami had this reaction, issued in a statement from the pro-peace pro-Israel pro-Palestinian group:

J Street rejects Sarah Palin’s comments attacking President Obama’s sensible policy on Israeli settlements in the West Bank yesterday during an ABC News interview with Barbara Walters.

Palin’s pandering to her right-wing base comes at the expense of the security of the State of Israel, the lives of those actually living the conflict, and the fundamental American interest in achieving a two-state solution in the near term. Her words reveal a glaring ignorance of damaging facts and a callous disregard of past and present U.S. policy.

For decades, American presidents have held that Israeli settlements in the West Bank are an impediment to peace. They are joined by the majority of Israelis and pro-Israel Americans who view the growing settlement enterprise as a threat to Israel’s very future as a Jewish democracy.

President Obama’s administration continued along that path yesterday, rightly and sensibly expressing concern with unilateral actions on both sides that would preempt the negotiation of final status issues that are necessary to achieve a two-state solution to the conflict.

J Street supports President Obama and Middle East Peace Envoy George Mitchell as they press the parties to begin the hard work of achieving a two-state solution, the only way to secure Israel’s future as a Jewish, democratic homeland.

Actually, it’s only common in Christian cemeteries. You won’t find a cross in the resting places of Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, or Hindus, Jacobi notes, adding “How did this man ever get a reputation as an intellectually respectable conservative judge?”

The Limbaugh comments comparing Obama (and Pelosi) to Hitler and the Nazis are grossly offensive and intolerable. They reflect a nasty and hyperbolic tendency on our political culture, one which makes reasoned discourse impossible, confuses disagreement with evil, and which makes it impossible to distinguish evil from ordinary politics.

Greenwald is still hounding the people who attacked MoveOn, and I’m especially interested to hear from the Anti-Defamation League. They’re one of the few such groups who can generate instant national headlines by accusing someone of trivializing the Holocaust. For Limbaugh to accuse the party that scored 77 percent of American Jews’ votes in 2008, a party of which every Jewish member of Congress except Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.) is a member, of being modern Nazis, goes far, far beyond what a MoveOn contest loser did in 2004.

The Israeli propaganda blitz around their attack on Gaza has been greeted with uncharacteristic skepticism by the American public and even by some of the mainstream US press.

Juan attributes that to a couple of things, first among them is the uneasiness of a lot of the American Jewish community over the attack, but he spends most of his post wondering whether the debacles of the Bush administration have made the public less eager, on the whole, to accept blithe assertions that the war is necessary. I think, though, he is right on the former point.

Unlike in previous Israeli conflicts, liberal American Jewry has an emerging institutional apparatus, led principally by J Street, the progressive Jewish lobby. True to its initial purpose, J Street has been out in front for the past nine days, in the press and in its online pressure efforts for an immediate ceasefire, ensuring that the American debate over the war doesn’t get hijacked by right-wingers who pass along the canard that support for war is support for Israel. For that effort, they and their allies have been criticized in rather harsh terms within the Jewish community, but there’s little sign of backing down. That’s given non-Jewish American progressives some breathing room to argue for a saner approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict without having to fend off charges of being somehow anti-Israel. These things are kind of hard to quantify, but so far it looks as if J Street isn’t doing so badly during its first test.