Radical Arab MKs: What would Abraham Lincoln do?

David Gleicher
Opinion/JPost
17 January '10

Both Liat Collins and Danny Ayalon, in their recent Jerusalem Post columns "The democratic dilemma" and "Civic responsibility should not be optional" respectively, raise the issue of how the government should respond to the anti-Israel actions of our radical Arab Knesset members. As a student of history, whenever I read about this problem, I think of Abraham Lincoln, the greatest American president, and his response to the activities of Representative Clement Vallandigham (pronounced veLANdigam).

When the American Civil War broke out in 1861, Vallandigham was a Democratic congressman, representing Dayton, Ohio. Some background for non-American readers: The Civil War involved the attempt of the southern slave-holding states to secede from the Union and form their own country, the Confederate States of America. Vallandigham, though personally opposed to slavery, believed that the federal government had no constitutional right to prevent the secession of the southern states. Naturally, he was even more adamantly opposed to the use of military force to pull the South back into the Union. Vallandigham was the leader of the "Copperheads," the anti-war, pro-Confederacy Democrats of the North.

In 1863, Gen. Ambrose Burnside, in charge of the military district of Ohio, issued an order declaring that public declarations of sympathy for the enemy would not be tolerated. Vallandigham was not deterred, and increased the provocative language of his speeches, charging that the war was being fought to free slaves, not to save the Union, and that the president was "King Lincoln" who should be removed from the presidency. He also declared that he "did not want to belong to the United States."

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