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The following analysis was authored by Tablet Magazine columnist and CAM editorial advisor Lee Smith:
Lindsey Graham had what we Americans call the “common touch.” As a boy, he worked in his parents’ small-town South Carolina bar and pool hall and learned how to talk with and listen to anyone. So it was only natural that as a U.S. senator he’d come to make friends all over the world. And now they’re mourning his death and grieving their loss.
“Israel has lost one of its greatest friends,” said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “America has lost a great patriot. I have lost a beloved friend.” The Knesset interrupted its proceedings for a rare moment of silence, with Speaker Amir Ohana describing Graham as “one of the greatest friends the State of Israel has ever had.”
Jewish American organizations echoed those sentiments. The Combat Antisemitism Movement (CAM) remembered him as a “stalwart friend of the Jewish people and state.” The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) hailed him as a “true champion of the U.S.-Israel relationship.” The American Jewish Committee (AJC) praised his decades of leadership defending Israel and confronting antisemitism. Few American lawmakers have ever been mourned so openly by the Jewish American community and Israel.
He had friends all over because he supported freedom everywhere. Iranian opposition activist Reza Pahlavi said Graham was a “steadfast friend of the Iranian people and a proud defender of freedom.” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky also expressed his condolences, writing, “America and the world have lost a resolute leader.”
It’s a testament to the strength of Graham’s convictions that during his seven decades on Earth he made all the right enemies. One Russian political analyst close to the Kremlin called Graham a “Russophobia maniac who did everything in his power to ensure the war in Ukraine dragged on.” For years, Russian-state media had routinely threatened to assassinate Graham for his support of Ukraine.
“The death of this hot-tempered and foul-mouthed senator will certainly not grieve any free human being,” said an Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesperson. Iranian state TV congratulated “the great nation of Iran on Lindsey Graham, the warmongering, anti-Iran US senator, being sent to hell.”
Predictably, Graham’s domestic opponents echoed the verbal attacks of U.S. adversaries. “He was a neocon warmonger,” said former Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene. “He was a murderer. He wanted to wipe out and kill many innocent people in Iran, in Gaza, in Lebanon.” Online commentators Ana Kasparian and Nick Fuentes responded to his death ghoulishly, both posting “Good riddance.”
Graham had long provoked ire from the far left and the isolationist right because of his belief that America was a force for global good. But the claims made by Tucker Carlson and others that Graham prioritized the interests of foreigners over Americans were absurd. I live in South Carolina and the senior senator from the Palmetto State worked as hard as any legislator for his constituents.
In truth, leftists and isolationists hated him because he was a target of an ongoing campaign, with both domestic and foreign instigators, to demoralize Americans. Making Graham look foolish or calling him “evil,” as Carson did, was intended to scare off ordinary Americans from holding the same beliefs as Graham did, which were conventionally normal American ideas about American virtues.
Graham’s view of the world has often been described as “Reaganite,” but there’s no need to draw on Cold War sentiments since the U.S. still has real enemies, and our strength depends in large part on our allies and ability to rally others to our cause. But the description is helpful insofar as it’s a reminder that Reagan himself represented a grassroots rejection of what many saw as a malaise that had settled over America prior to his 1980 election.
That atmosphere wasn’t entirely organic. Rather, it had been generated by America’s enemies, particularly the Soviet Union, which flooded the U.S. media and education system with anti-American propaganda. Among other wedge issues Moscow hammered away at, they believed — correctly in fact — that weakening our alliance with Israel would undermine America’s global standing. And Russian spies were again right to believe that cultivating antisemitism in the free world would weaken us. Our enemies are still trying to destroy us with the same methods.
Israel’s loss of support on the left and increasingly among younger conservatives today is not organic. It’s not because poll respondents dislike one Israeli prime minister in particular, or because Israel used “disproportionate” force against a terror group that hides behind civilians. It’s because for three generations, radical professors have been indoctrinating American students to hate Israel. The same is happening in the right-wing podcast world where, among others, Carlson and Candace Owens, frequent guests of the Russian government, are pushing anti-American, and pro-Kremlin, talking points against Israel to hobble America. Warmongering Israel, goes the message, is evil — yes, the same slogans and slurs used to smear Graham.
Graham stood for America and its friends and the isolationists and the left despised him for it. He became one of the Senate’s strongest defenders of Israel’s response to the October 7th massacre. “Israel is fighting our war,” he said repeatedly. He saw that what Hamas represented wasn’t just a threat to Israel but was part of a broader movement of Islamist terrorism directed against the West as a whole.
Graham also viewed the recent surge of antisemitism here at home with alarm. He supported vigorous enforcement of Title VI protections for Jewish students, backed the use of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) Working Definition of Antisemitism in federal policy, advocated funding for the Nonprofit Security Grant Program protecting synagogues and other Jewish institutions, and urged universities to defend Jewish students from intimidation and violence.
Lindsey Graham was a good man, an excellent senator, a great American, a tireless defender of freedom at home and abroad, and a friend who will be missed across the world.
