by Robert Weiner

March 20, 2008

He is the son of German Holocaust survivors, and as he plans a run for the Republican nomination to replace Sen. Frank Lautenberg, Murray Sabrin is airing views bound to stir up controversy in New Jersey’s Jewish community.

As a conservative and onetime Libertarian Party member, Sabrin opposes foreign aid to Israel and all other nations.

He calls the threat of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to wipe Israel off the map “inflated rhetoric.”

And his support for Texas Congressman Ron Paul’s run for the White House is unlikely to please pro-Israel activists who remember that Paul voted against a congressional resolution that condemned Hizbullah and that supported Israel’s right to defend itself in the Second Lebanon War.

Meanwhile, Sabrin, a professor of finance at Ramapo College in Mahwah, said his “pet issue is freedom and liberty.” He believes in “letting the states decide” such questions as same-sex marriage, gun control laws, and indoor smoking bans.

He favors sharp reductions in taxes and government spending, knowing, he says, that it will take 30 to 40 years to “be where people save for their own retirement, including income and health care and whatever benefits they can get from their employers.”

Sabrin views Lautenberg as “out of touch with the people of New Jersey and the economic realities of the last 20 years. He spends like there is no tomorrow. In fact, he is probably one of the most anti-business people in the Congress.”

Sabrin opposes funding federal agencies that “do not serve the American people well,” targeting the departments of Education, Agriculture, Energy, Housing and Urban Development, and Commerce.

“The country should be run by the people,” he said. “The people create business. Private property rights will prevent a lot of environmental degradation.”

Sabrin’s primary race against State Sen. Joseph Pennacchio (R-Dist. 26) will be his third try for elective office. He ran as the Libertarian candidate for governor in 1997. Three years later Sabrin registered as a Republican and lost a primary race for a United States Senate nomination.

A right to force

Sitting in the corner of a couch in his Jersey City campaign headquarters, Sabrin spoke of his own view of Israel and its Arab neighbors.

“If Israel believes it is being threatened, it has a right to use force against whatever threat it perceives,” he told NJ Jewish News. “Israel has a very strong military. It would be foolish for any nation to attack it.”

But, he noted, “there is a very strong peace movement in Israel, which would disagree with the foreign policy of the Israeli government. So I think it is interesting that there are people in the United States who want Israel to have a policy that maybe a substantial number of Israelis disagree with.”

Like Paul, whom he now backs for reelection to a Texas congressional seat, Sabrin opposes the Bush administration’s war in Iraq.

“I didn’t see Iraq as being a threat to the national security of the American people,” he said. “Here it is five years later, and we are still there with no end in sight, and that’s where the trillions of dollars in debt are going. We had such goodwill in the world after 9/11 because of these attacks, and now that good will has been dissipated to a large extent.”

If he were currently a senator, Sabrin said, he would vote to overturn the presidential veto of a bill banning American forces from using waterboarding and other coercive interrogation techniques.

“Torture is not something the United States government should condone,” he said. “If there is torturing going on, I think it is a violation of international law.”

Questioned about federal funding of fetal stem cell research, Sabrin quoted Thomas Jefferson: “To compel a man to furnish funds for the propagation of an idea he abhors is sinful and tyrannical.”

Sabrin opposes most legal abortions, exempting only those performed to save pregnant women’s lives. He would not allow rape victims to end pregnancies caused by their attackers.

“A rape victim has been invaded. A sperm has invaded that woman’s body,” he said. “Therefore, science will come up with a method to block that impregnation from happening. We should not destroy human life because it is inconvenient to us.”

Individual sanctity

Sabrin was born in Germany. His father escaped from a Nazi labor camp and immigrated to New York, where Sabrin was raised on the Lower East Side and in the Bronx.

His father, he said, “barely survived the war, and the impression he leaves on me is big government can go to an extreme and cause terrible things, like when your liberty and your life are taken away from you, just because you belong to a particular group.”

Sabrin views Judaism as “the essence of what America is all about — the sanctity of the individual. Human life is protected in all its forms, and the government is created to protect all human life.”

But were he to win his party’s nomination, Sabrin could anticipate powerful opposition from some fellow Jews.

Suzanne Kurtz, spokeswoman for the Washington-based Republican Jewish Coalition, told NJJN her organization “will not support Sabrin either in the primary or in the unlikely event he gets the nomination. His views are outside of the GOP mainstream and certainly outside of the RJC staff.”

“I don’t know where they are coming from,” Sabrin responded. “I think it is a very narrow-minded view of my candidacy because I think my positions are consistent not only with the Republican Party of limited government, but it is good for the American people not to have our resources used by both sides in the Mideast.”

“I love America,” he continued. “I have to look at what is good for the American people. What is good for the American people is to have peaceful relations with everyone in the world, because being in constant conflict is not going to make goodwill, and it is going to drain us financially.”

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