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In search, post-Buckley, of anti-Semitism

By Seth Mandel

August 15, 2008
 

You could say the Russians had been caught red-handed.

The Soviet allies in the general assembly of the United Nations could be considered a lot of things, but smarter than Daniel Patrick Moynihan will never be one -- not after Nov. 10, 1975, the date of the infamous "Zionism is racism" resolution, as it's known.

Eight years earlier, U.N. member states had been discussing how to define racism. Tunisia's representative posited that Nazism was a form of racism. The representative of the USSR countered that Nazism was the sum of all racist parts. Racism, he said, is really a form of Nazism.

When the world body in 1975 would vote on whether Zionism was a form of racism, U.S. Ambassador Moynihan pointed out, they were actually voting on equating Zionism with Nazism. It was factually incorrect, historically ridiculous, and was one step away from officially endorsing anti-Semitism, Moynihan protested.

This discussion has become relevant again today. Yuval Levin, a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., recently wrote about receiving certain types of email because of his very Jewish name. Among them, he said, were vicious anti-Semitic emails.

"The volume and depravity of it is beyond belief," Levin wrote, "and the easy way in which these emails tend to flow from anti-Semitism to Bush-hatred and back is a genuine cultural phenomenon."

What is the source of a hatred that targets President George W. Bush and prominent Jewish pundits in the same breath? Let's ask the man who swims daily in the reservoir of that hatred: Joe Klein.

The new blood libels

"The fact that a great many Jewish neoconservatives -- people like Joe Lieberman and the crowd over at Commentary -- plumped for this war [in Iraq], and now for an even more foolish assault on Iran, raised the question of divided loyalties: using U.S. military power, U.S. lives and money, to make the world safe for Israel," Klein, a columnist for Time Magazine, wrote in a post on Time's blog, Swampland. 

When I saw that, I sent that quote off to a friend to whom I thought it would be of interest, and assumed the incident over. But the post set off a firestorm, and Klein made it clear he finally had the fight he'd been waiting for.

When the word "anti-Semitism" was brought up by his opponents at Commentary Magazine, Klein told his audience how excited he was.

"I must say that's rather thrilling coming from the Commentary crowd," he gushed. "You want evidence of divided loyalties? How about the 'benign domino theory' that so many Jewish neoconservatives talked to me about -- off the record, of course -- in the runup to the Iraq war, the idea that Israel's security could be won by taking out Saddam, which would set off a cascade of disaster for Israel's enemies in the region?"

"Do you actually deny," he challenged, "that the casus belli that dare not speak its name wasn't, as I wrote in February 2003, a desire to make the world safe for Israel?"

So, he only uses the term neoconservative when it's preceded by "Jewish". He stated that the real reason we went to war in Iraq was to make Israel safer. He went on to dismiss the possibility that Iran would bomb Israel if it attained nuclear weapons. But still, I can't help but feel that something is missing.

"Furthermore, as a Jew, I find it offensive that the American Jewish Committee (former publisher of Commentary) would support such an ideologically unbalanced publication as Commentary," he continued, "one that spouts a Likudnik bellicosity that is out of sync with the beliefs of the vast majority of American Jews."

Ah, there it is: "Likudnik bellicosity". Now the portrait of the dreaded "neocon" is complete: Jewish, conservative, duplicitous, Jewish, disloyal, warmongering, Jewish, and Likudnik. In Joe Klein's mind, every neoconservative is Bibi Netanyahu.

And he hates Bibi Netanyahu.

But don't Jews also control the media?

"They want Time Magazine to fire or silence me," Klein wrote.

And isn't everything funded by Jewish money?

"[Sen. John McCain] has rattled sabers noisily," Klein warned, "joked about bomb-bomb-bombing Iran and surrounded himself with, and been funded by, Jewish neoconservatives...."

Well, at least he's not using anti-Israel, anti-Jewish language to describe American and Israeli plans in the Middle East, like the discredited Noam Chomsky would.  

"I think it represents a really dangerous anachronistic neocolonial sensibility," Klein told The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg, echoing Chomsky's term for land-grabbing, money-grubbing Israelis.

OK, well, the one thing he's got left in his defense is that Klein isn't violent toward the Jewish neocons.

"There's this great book coming out called 'In a Time of War,' about the West Point class of 2002," Klein told Goldberg, "and you know, you read something like this and you want throttle Doug Feith, you just want to whoop him upside the head."

But rest assured, Klein is no anti-Semite!

"I am anti-neoconservative," he told Goldberg.

The more things change...

The issue is not a new one, of course. But what's interesting -- and important -- about this latest episode is the way it mirrors what the late William F. Buckley found when he went "In Search of Anti-Semitism," the title of his 1992 book.

Buckley, the founder of National Review and longtime leader of the conservative movement, was faced with one of his own columnists, Joe Sobran, being accused of anti-Semitism.

Buckley also examined the neoconservative question, as well as the case of someone who was a contemporary of Buckley and of ours: Pat Buchanan.

At a 1986 meeting of the Philadelphia Society, the loyalty of the Jewish neoconservatives was questioned. Afterward, conservative author Russel Kirk and political theorist Paul Gottfried made statements that, today, come from people like Joe Klein.

Kirk: "What really animates the neoconservatives, especially Irving Kristol, is the preservation of Israel. That lies in the back of everything."

Gottfried: "I don't think one can differentiate the neoconservatives from the very large Jewish composition of the movement, and the fact that many of the Jewish leaders of the movement broke from the Left precisely over the question of Israel and other Jewish issues...."

Both statements were made by members of the conservative movement who were clearly frustrated with what they believed were a small number of ex-Leftist anti-communists who were somehow able to exert a disproportionate amount of influence in their new movement. Both statements made clear the authors' opinion that "Jewish" is redundant when paired with "neoconservative."

Both statements also ignored the fact that most neoconservatives (just as most conservatives, most leftists, most liberals, most progressives -- most of anything outside Israel) are not Jewish, and that there are plausible -- in fact, quite likely -- political explanations for the neoconservatives' influence. For example, the neoconservatives tended to embody in their political discourse a zest for social justice and populist causes on the one hand, and a realist, hawkish, patriotic sense of policy on the other. It's certainly possible that the public agreed with the neoconservatives' political middle ground, and that their elected representatives followed suit. Eschewing such logical explanations for negative ethnic generalities is a surefire sign of prejudice, in this case anti-Semitism.

Which brings us to the other example that we are still dealing with today: Buchanan. We won't dwell too much, except to say that when Buckley encountered Buchanan's anti-Semitism, Buchanan was engaged in scurrilous attacks on Jewish bogeymen, like the Israel lobby. He's still at it today, which means he is simply unrepentant. I guess he's not a religious man.

On July 15, Buchanan wrote: "Israel and its Fifth Column in this city (Washington, D.C.) seek to stampede us into war with Iran." The term "fifth column," according to Princeton University, means "a subversive group that supports the enemy and engages in espionage or sabotage; an enemy in your midst".

In May, Buchanan warned that "With Israel, the Israeli lobby, the neocons, and Dick Cheney insisting on [American] air strikes [on Iran]," we were headed for another war.

Lessons from the past

I believe there are two lessons for the current political climate in which anti-Semitism is paraded behind the no less ugly mask of anti-Zionism, and both lessons were presented in Buckley's findings a decade and a half ago. The first is that, Jewish or not, Joe Klein must be taken to task for his anti-Semitism. Few people question that Buchanan is an anti-Semite, but if you removed the name from the aforementioned Buchanan quotes, they could be easily attributable to Klein.

Buckley admitted that his friend Sobran's columns were anti-Semitic because editors and columnists for major cultural publications are assumed knowledgeable in the terrain on which they tread.

"A savage entering a Catholic church who absentmindedly chewed on consecrated wafers would not be thought blasphemous," Buckley wrote. "The non-savage, doing the same thing, would. Naifs cannot commit a black mass; cosmopolitans can, and do." Klein is no naif. He cannot, therefore, be excused.

The second lesson is about purging anti-Semitism in all its forms from our political institutions. Buckley made it a mission of his to make anti-Semites unwelcome in the conservative movement, and he more or less expelled the expression of anti-Semitism from conservatism. It must continue to be chased from society.

"In the last 15 or 20 years, under the leadership of the Soviet Union, it became plain that institutional anti-Semitism was consolidating around the political Left, where, ideologically, class hatreds belong," Buckley wrote. In England, he wrote, the British Left took possession of institutional anti-Semitism. "So does the animus move in the United States," Buckley continued, "where The Nation magazine exhibits the same kind of toleration toward anti-Semitism... that it shows to Fidel Castro, the Sandinistas, and Alger Hiss." 

"Under the leadership of the Soviet Union" isn't hyperbole, because it brings us back to where we started, with the Soviet Union trying to label Zionism as Nazism. That was passed down to the generation Buckley was scolding, and then to the authors of those emails to Yuval Levin in which they express their hatred for the fascism Bush has perpetrated under the control of his Zionist puppet masters, the neocons. Those emailers don't come up with that stuff on their own; they look to "brave" pundits like Joe Klein for inspiration and direction.

Buckley's assertion of anti-Semitism's mass exodus Leftward can no longer be reasonably scoffed at. In his primary campaign this year, Rep. Steve Cohen, a Democratic congressman representing Tennessee's 9th district, found out the hard way. Cohen is Jewish, and his main opponent in the Democratic primary was Nikki Tinker, an African-American. Earlier this year, voters in the district (including Cohen) received fliers in the mail that said "Memphis Congressman Steve Cohen and the JEWS HATE Jesus".

Why, a reasonable person might ask, did we not hear more about this in the mainstream media, when it took place during an election year in which race and prejudice are inescapable instruments of public hectoring?

The communities to whom this is not an outrage have much soul-searching to do.

Seth Mandel is the managing editor of The Jewish State.