Russia Neocons target Syrian hospitals

[Michael K.]

http://www.cnn.com/2015/10/23/middleeast/syria-hospital-attack-russia/

Russian airstrike hits Syrian hospital, aid group says

By Nick Paton Walsh and Joshua Berlinger, CNN
Updated 8:09 AM ET, Sat October 24, 2015

Video shows apparent airstrike on hospital 02:15

Gaziantep, Turkey (CNN)After the first airstrike hit near a hospital in eastern Idlib, Syria, no one was injured, according to one source.

But then the warplane returned.

"Run, the plane is coming back," aid workers can be heard saying on video, right before the next explosion hits.


Activists say the incident was a "double-tap." That's when attackers strike, wait for first responders to arrive and then hit the same spot.

A dozen people were killed in the incident, which was caught on video by the Syrian Civil Defense, a humanitarian aid group.

The Syrian-American Medical Society, which runs the hospital, says the strikes were launched by Russian warplanes.


Russia strongly denies the claim, saying it is not targeting civilians during its military operations inside Syria.

Russia began airstrikes in Syria in September to help the government of Bashar al-Assad Assad fight terrorists, Russia says.

Some Russian airstrikes have appeared to hit areas controlled by various rebel groups, including some that are supported by the United States.

Why Russia is pressing the 'accelerate' pedal in Syria

Multiple hospitals targeted

This is the third report in a week of hospitals being targeted in and around Aleppo, Syria.

Video from a rescue group shows what it says is an unexploded cluster bomb.

Russia denied on Thursday that it used cluster munitions.

Assad's regime has been accused of using cluster bombs in the past, accusations the government has denied.

https://www.hrw.org/news/2015/10/25/russia/syria-possibly-unlawful-russian-air-strikes

[Ognir]

  Fuck sake MK WTF

Source cnn
reads exactly out of an israeli handbook


Hey who are these Russian neocons?

[Michael K.]

There was a video there. How is CNN any weaker than RT.  You mean you just sit there as Russian state reports of Russian military successes pass for news, but I run a story with video evidence and you pan it because its CNN. 

What about the link to Human Rights Watch I included?

So CNN running the story makes it false?  How does that work? Oh great hoax detector, maybe you can sort out who the crisis actors are here.

Your objection is meant to appear principled, but it is just the opposite.  Your argument is to attack the source with a biased blanket special case argument, instead of looking at the facts and arguing about them at all.

You will be happy to know that you are on the same side as Alex Jones.

[Ognir]

Not attack the source MK
Read the fucking article
Seems computer generated

[MikeWB]

Why did you change the title so drastically? What the hell is "russia neocons"?

Also, citing HRW is a joke.

Hey Michael K, hope you're at lest getting paid to post this disinfo.... hope you're not doing it for free .

[Ognir]

Propaganda alert: US fears Russian subs will cut undersea Internet cables
http://www.sott.net/article/304876-Propaganda-alert-US-fears-Russian-subs-will-cut-undersea-Internet-cables

US military and intelligence officials are anxious about Russian submarines and spy ships operating around undersea global communications cables, The New York Times reported, adding that the main concern is Russia cutting the cables during conflict.

The report added that there was no concrete evidence supporting the concerns and was based on increased mistrust of any Russian activity.

"I'm worried every day about what the Russians may be doing," Rear Adm. Frederick J. Roegge, commander of the Navy's submarine fleet in the Pacific, told the newspaper.

The undersea cables are seen as a serious vulnerability because of their importance in US economy and military and the lack of protection against a potential attack. They carry global business worth more than $10 trillion a day and more than 95 percent of daily communications, according to the NYT. But the locations of most of the cables are well-known and can be relatively easily reached without anyone noticing.

"The risk here is that any country could cause damage to the system and do it in a way that is completely covert, without having a warship with a cable-cutting equipment right in the area," said Michael Sechrist, a former project manager for a Harvard-M.I.T. research project funded in part by the US Defense Department.


Comment: You don't need Russian submarines when you have an Internet 'kill switch', unless you want someone to blame.
If these cables deal with $10 trillion a day then you can switch them off and blame Russian submarines for the pending economic collapse.

[Michael K.]

I will explain Russian Neoconservativism at length later.

But, as for honest debate, you haven't disproven the story at all, but have gone far off course and embraced many obvious fallacies in an effort not to disprove it, but to cover it up with irrational nonsense.

Where is your intellectual integrity and willingness to look at the facts in a case by case manner?

You both can't be so stupid, so I call bullshit.  Who brought getting paid into it?

[Ognir]

MK 96% of world media owned by a bunch of jews
WTF do you expect me to believe? cnn?

[yankeedoodle]

"Run, the plane is coming back," aid workers can be heard saying on video, right before the next explosion hits.
 

Exit, stage left.   

[Ognir]

Yankie was a very slow moving plane 

[MikeWB]

HRW is a jеw-run, jеw-started, pro-jеw, US State Department funded, NGO whose main purpose is shaming of the enemies of the US & Israel. That's it! They're scum of the earth who whitewash Israel's genocide against Palestinians, cover the abuses and mass killings by Saudi Barbaria, Qatar, Bahrain, Indonesia and the rest of the US allies.

When someone starts using HRW data or opinions to make a point, you can either assume they're an idiot and don't know any better or that they're zionists.

Human Rights Watch was founded as a private American NGO in 1978, under the name Helsinki Watch, to monitor the former Soviet Union's compliance with the Helsinki Accords.[3] Helsinki Watch adopted a practice of publicly "naming and shaming" abusive governments through media coverage and through direct exchanges with policymakers. By shining the international spotlight on human rights violations in the Soviet Union and its European partners, Helsinki Watch contributed to the democratic transformations of the region in the late 1980s.[3]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Rights_Watch

And who runs HRW? Kenneth Roth... a german jеw.

[Michael K.]

Is this conversation being monitored?
https://www.rt.com/news/319859-russia-nato-civilians-syria/

Moscow demands US-led coalition in Syria 'prove or deny' allegations Russia is 'bombing civilians'
Published time: 27 Oct, 2015 14:58
Edited time: 27 Oct, 2015 16:55

The Russian Ministry of Defense has summoned military attaches of NATO countries and Saudi Arabia on Tuesday, asking the officials to clarify their countries' allegations that Russian airstrikes in Syria have hit civilian targets.
Trends
Russia-NATO relations
"Today we invited military attaches from the US, Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the NATO bloc to ask them to give official validation to their statements, or make a rebuttal," Defense Ministry deputy head Anatoly Antonov said on Tuesday.

READ MORE: Kremlin dismisses HRW accusations that Russian strikes killed civilians in Syria

It particularly touches upon Western media's "outrageous accusations" that the Russian Air Force has allegedly bombed hospitals in Syria, the military official said.

Information attacks on Moscow's anti-terror efforts in the region have intensified recently, Antonov said, adding that the Russian military is "blamed not only for conducting airstrikes on the 'moderate opposition,' but also on civilian buildings, such as hospitals, mosques and schools."

READ MORE: Putin: No need to distinguish between 'moderate' & other terrorists

Funny, if CNN is part of an effort to fabricate nonexistent hospital bombing CGA videos, why are they almost the last news outlet to carry the story four days after it allegedly happened?

HRW is run by a Jew, therefore nothing it says can be true?  That is retarded and wouldn't pass with anyone but a bunch of gutter punk neo Nazis.  You aren't proving a thing by making such sweeping generalizations, except that you are biased beyond reasonable.

Ognir, you don't complain when KKKomerade WB here runs RT propaganda without an ounce of skepticism.  A major power's state media cannot be relied on to cover its war without significant bias.  Yet that is never an issue with you there in Swissyland, the place where Jews and Nazis and Commies all meet to plan their retirement.

More CGI?:  http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/22/three-syrian-hospitals-bombed-since-russian-airstrikes-began-doctors-say

[yankeedoodle]

Funny, if CNN is part of an effort to fabricate nonexistent hospital bombing CGA videos, why are they almost the last news outlet to carry the story four days after it allegedly happened?

HRW is run by a Jew, therefore nothing it says can be true?  That is retarded and wouldn't pass with anyone but a bunch of gutter punk neo Nazis.  You aren't proving a thing by making such sweeping generalizations, except that you are biased beyond reasonable.

Ognir, you don't complain when KKKomerade WB here runs RT propaganda without an ounce of skepticism.  A major power's state media cannot be relied on to cover its war without significant bias.  Yet that is never an issue with you there in Swissyland, the place where Jews and Nazis and Commies all meet to plan their retirement.

Takes a day or two to write the script and shoot the vid, idiot.  Vlad is moving fast, and he has them on the back foot.

Don't waste our time pretending that you don't understand that organizations like HRW intentionally put out much true and beneficial info, so as to establish the credibility that they exploit so as to deceive.

And, in a world where mass media is jew-controlled and totally one-sided, you are here trying to stiffle any posts that contradict the jew media, so, effectively, you are, either intentionally or because you're a rabid fucking chase-your-tail idiot, working for the jew media.

It's a credit to Vlad that - on the supposition that your claim to be Russian is true - he keeps you out of his country, but the problem is that you are, presumably, here in Yankee Doodle land, as, perhaps, an agent for...hmm...who?

[Michael K.]

I am a person who would be satisfied with the proof of what is true, whatever it turns out to be.  I have some proof that shows some explosions and so forth, and I hear a denial but not a specific one with any information. 

I would be happy to just find out something I could go by, rather than wanting to believe the thing is true.  I don't want it to be true either, but the kind of DISPROOF you offer is unreasonable.  There has to be some way to establish the video is fake, if it is.  Even if you were right there, you would still need some proof before you had any right to act like it is completely ridiculous.

But no; either by clairvoyance of 'Vlad's' inner state, or axioms out of stool about how one views all mainstream media, (with the exception of RT, which is mainstream media but is 'mostly true'); in which you seek to establish facts using some mystical alternative methods, lying on a shaky substrate of fallacious logic, you preemptive dismiss any thought of Russian Neoconservative intransigence.

So, for the record, I am not going to deny the posssibility of your position, that some or all of this phenomenon is a hoax, is in part or in whole right. It's just that I would need to have more proof before I decided.  And if it were found to be a hoax, I would not give you any credit for helping solve it with not one shred of real evidence to justify the bias and prejudice with which you make conclusions.

[rmstock]

Why did you change the title so drastically? What the hell is "russia neocons"?

During the cold war when the polar ice cap (North Pole edition) was still intact,
a few sightings of  "russia neocons" have been rumored, but as at the time the verb
neocon still had to be coined, these rumors of sightings were stored only inside the
vatican library at the same section where monster of Loch Ness material was archived.
But hell when a Russian Grizly falls into washing powder polluted sea water
any sighting of oversized snow white polar bears is possible.

[Michael K.]

According to Wikipedia article containing references on neoconservative politics:

During February 2009 Andrew Sullivan (Oxford, Harvard) wrote he no longer took neoconservatism seriously because its basic tenet was defense of Israel:[89]

The closer you examine it, the clearer it is that neoconservatism, in large part, is simply about enabling the most irredentist elements in Israel and sustaining a permanent war against anyone or any country who disagrees with the Israeli right. That's the conclusion I've been forced to these last few years. And to insist that America adopt exactly the same constant-war-as-survival that Israelis have been slowly forced into... But America is not Israel. And once that distinction is made, much of the neoconservative ideology collapses.

Putin is firmly enmeshed in the Israeli far right.  He is accompanying a Lubavich rabbi in public oftime, his Russian emigre population in the State of Israel is strongly behind the ultra-rightist Avigdor Lieberman.  He is pacifying the Middle East for a Greater Zionist Israel using the pretext of ISIS, which was created for this purpose in classic 'Hegelian' fashion.

Jean Kirkpatrick enunciates a view of replacing Communist totalitarianism with autocratic traditionalism which as theory is indistinguishable from National Bolshevism:

[Traditional autocrats] do not disturb the habitual rhythms of work and leisure, habitual places of residence, habitual patterns of family and personal relations. Because the miseries of traditional life are familiar, they are bearable to ordinary people who, growing up in the society, learn to cope ...

[Revolutionary Communist regimes] claim jurisdiction over the whole life of the society and make demands for change that so violate internalized values and habits that inhabitants flee by the tens of thousands ...

It is not as though I have not produced numerous factual examples as evidence of a strategic alliance between the post-Jewish, post-Communist, post-Soviet Union and the State of Israel and in particular its far right chauvinists

And suppose one argues that Russia is a strategic partner with Zionist arch enemies Iran and Syria, the extent of that partnership is a short leash indeed.  But with the Jews there is an throughgoing and inseparable and personally warm relationship.

[yankeedoodle]

During the cold war when the polar ice cap (North Pole edition) was still intact,
a few sightings of  "russia neocons" have been rumored, but as at the time the verb
neocon still had to be coined, these rumors of sightings were stored only inside the
vatican library at the same section where monster of Loch Ness material was archived.
But hell when a Russian Grizly falls into washing powder polluted sea water
any sighting of oversized snow white polar bears is possible.

[rmstock]

According to Wikipedia article containing references on neoconservative politics:

From the same wiki page now follow two references in full, not only
because both are dead links, but also at archive.org the first article
of the two part series by Jonah Goldberg has been wiped completely into
non-existent status except for two copies from May and June in 2003,
just after the Bush Jr. Iraq campaign had ended ...


May 16, 2003, 9:00 a.m.
State of Confusion
Brouhahas — intellectual and otherwise.
https://web.archive.org/web/20030528045721/http://www.nationalreview.com/goldberg/goldberg051603.asp

  "AUTHOR'S NOTE: When I announced last week that I would be doing a
   series of articles on neoconservatism, a number of readers e-mailed me
   to complain that conservatives are getting too bogged-down in labels
   and prefixes and I shouldn't encourage the trend. I agree. My aim here
   is destroy, or at least pare back, the increasingly ludicrous use of
   the word "neoconservative" and maybe even a few other silly labels. If
   none of this is your cup of tea, that's fine. There's plenty of other
   elsewhere stuff on NRO or even my syndicated column.
   
   Conservatives are accustomed to liberals not understanding the zoology
   of our movement. But the use and abuse of the term "neoconservative"
   has exceeded even the high allowance for cliché and ignorance generally
   afforded to those who write or talk about conservatism from outside the
   conservative ant farm. In fact, neoconservative has become a Trojan
   Horse for vast arsenal of ideological attacks and insinuations. For
   some it means Jewish conservative. For others it means hawk. A few
   still think it means squishy conservative or ex-liberal. And a few
   don't even know what the word means, they just think it makes them
   sound knowledgeable when they use it.
   
   "Hawks Rip Into Mideast Plan; Ex-Speaker Gingrich leads a
   neoconservative charge against the State Department, alleging efforts
   to 'undermine the president's policies.'" That was the headline of the
   page-one story on Newt's now famous broadside. The only other
   "neoconservative" critic of the State Department mentioned in the
   article: Famed ex-Trotskyist and Upper West Side polemicist, Tom DeLay
   (R., Tex.).
   
   "What is a neoconservative by your definition?" Chris Matthews asked
   the Washington Post's Dana Milbank on his cable program Hardball.
   "....Give me a formal definition of a neocon, historically speaking."
   
   "Well," answered Milbank, "it's a split going really back to the '70s
   over detente and how to deal with the Soviet Union. It's essentially
   the hard-line of the — within the Republican party as opposed to the
   establishment which had been dominant. Now, Reagan was part of — more
   of that conservative side and the first President Bush went back to
   more of the establishment."
   
   "But why do they call them neocons? New cons or conservatives? Why that
   phrase?"
   
   "Well, because the old kind of conservative is the alternative to
   that," Milbank replied.
   
   Some definitions are more high-falutin. Michael Lind — widely hailed as
   a conservative who moved to the Left — channels some of the more
   feverish paleocons when he writes in the British magazine, The New
   Statesman, that "Most neoconservative defence intellectuals ... are
   products of the largely Jewish-American Trotskyist movement of the
   1930s and 1940s, which morphed into anti-communist liberalism between
   the 1950s and 1970s and finally into a kind of militaristic and
   imperial right with no precedents in American culture or political
   history." But a recent article in the New York Times says the neocons
   aren't Trotskyists, they're Straussians: "They are the
   neoconservatives, or neocons a catchall name for a disparate group of
   authors, academics, media moguls and public servants who trace their
   intellectual lineage (accurately or not) to the teachings of a German
   émigré named Leo Strauss."
   
   Confused? It gets a lot worse. In fact, it's increasingly difficult to
   find plain-old "conservatives" anywhere these days. National Review,
   according to a ludicrous article in The New York Observer is a
   "paleo-conservative magazine" which is "seen as a kind of a relic by
   the new neocons" but according to The American Conservative, National
   Review is not only "safely in neocon hands," we actually symbolize the
   neocon takeover of the conservative movement. Often, the absurdity has
   become syllogistic: Neoconservatives are conservatives who favor war
   and if you are a conservative and favor war you are a neoconservative.
   My own beloved mother perfectly captured the nebulousness of the term.
   When asked whether she was a neocon by The New York Observer, she
   jokingly replied, "You mean the people who like to kill people and
   break things. That's me!"
   
   And then, of course, there's the Jew thing. Neoconservative and Jewish
   are synonymous for all sorts of people who don't like neocons or Jews
   or both. But we can get to that later.
   
   First, it's important to point out that this confusion isn't new. In
   fact, it's baked into the cake. Let me give you an example from
   personal experience.
   
   I used to work at the American Enterprise Institute, by all accounts
   the center of the neoconservative universe. In fact, I used to work for
   Ben Wattenberg, a man I believe The New Republic once called the
   "Titular Deity of the Neoconservatives." Anyway, when I was a policy
   peon there AEI was a Reaganite government in exile. One Friday, Joshua
   Muravchik, Muravchik probably the premiere neocon foreign-policy
   intellectual of his generation, was giving what used to be called a
   "brown-bag lecture" (I believe they now call them "Friday Forums") on
   the current state of neoconservatism. A who's who of Reaganite
   intellectuals were in attendance. During the Q&A I asked to explain
   what exactly a neoconservative is. His answer was a surprisingly
   unsatisfying bit of sophistry — something like "neoconservatism is the
   body of beliefs held by people who call themselves neoconservative."
   
   However, in the course of his answer, Muravchik said that the Reagan
   movement was primarily a foreign-policy cause united around defeating
   Communism. He suggested (and this is largely from my memory) that the
   foreign-policy neocons permitted the religious and economic neocons to
   sign on to their cause.
   
   At this assertion, an "au contraire" was offered from Irwin Stelzer, a
   highly regarded economist, famous neocon, and adviser to Rupert
   Murdoch. He said that Reaganism — of the neocon variety — was
   essentially an economic philosophy and while anti-Communism was surely
   a vital part, foreign-policy activists were simply another wing
   emanating from the core of the true Reagan coalition. Seconds after
   Stelzer had made his comments, my friend Michael Novak — one of
   America's premiere theologians and social thinkers and an NRO
   contributor — begged to differ. While, of course, fighting for free
   markets and against the Red menace was vital to Reaganism, these
   policies were largely outgrowths of a moral and religious vision, which
   is why the Reagan movement was essentially a religious cause. An
   intellectual brouhaha ensued — and, I'm proud to say, I started it.
   Now, one of the things I need to stress is that all of these people
   spoke of Reaganism as an explicitly neoconservative movement and
   phenomena. This points to the Reagan's FDR-like political genius for
   convincing various factions to each see him as their undisputed
   standard-bearer. But it also points to the fact that even the leaders
   of the "neoconservative movement" — whatever that meant or means —
   could not agree on what neoconservatism is.
   
   Coming Next: How It All Got Started. "


May 20, 2003 12:00 P.M.
The Neoconservative Invention
No new kid on the block.
By Jonah Goldberg
https://web.archive.org/web/20121114100459/http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/206955/neoconservative-invention/jonah-goldberg


Jonah Goldberg

  "EDITOR'S NOTE: This is part two in a series on neoconservatism. You can
   read part one here.
   
   The word "neoconservative" was coined by Michael Harrington and the
   editors of Dissent to describe their old friends who'd moved to the
   right. It was an insult, along the lines of "running dog" or "fellow
   traveler." Or perhaps the "neo" was intended to conjure "neo-Nazi," the
   only other political label to sport the prefix. As Seymour Martin
   Lipset, one of the most-respected social scientists of the 20th century
   and an original neocon wrote, the term "was invented as an invidious
   label to undermine political opponents, most of whom have been unhappy
   with being so described."
   
   But the important thing to remember is that the term described a
   process which the Left considered intellectual betrayal, not a distinct
   ideology. Anyway, the first neoconservatives, according to the accepted
   oral history, were the former Trotskyist college students who hung out
   in a u-shaped stall called Alcove #1 next to the cafeteria at City
   College in the mid-1930s. The documentary Arguing the World famously
   focused on four of them: Irving Kristol (father of Bill), Nathan
   Glazer, Irving Howe (who recruited Irving to the Trotskyist cause), and
   Daniel Bell. But there were quite a few others, including Seymour
   Martin Lipset, Melvin Lasky, and Albert Wohlstetter. The much larger
   group of Communist students were the gang over at Alcove #2, which
   included Julius Rosenberg. The Alcove #1 guys considered themselves
   anti-Stalinist dissidents (Bell, considered himself pretty much
   anti-everything). Kristol explained that he learned to think and
   theorize from the Trotskyites, primarily from the works of James
   Burnham, Max Schachtman, and Trotsky himself. It is this dissident
   intellectualism, many have noted, which drove the Alcove #1 guys to the
   right over the years.
   
   Obviously, even this story muddies the waters since Howe was never any
   kind of conservative. His rightward migration went little further than
   from A to B, becoming a democratic socialist. How conservative Bell and
   Nathan Glazer ever became is a subject for debate at a coffeehouse or
   faculty lounge. It's certainly true that Bell rejected the neocon label
   (quitting The Public Interest after only one year as coeditor) and that
   Glazer wore it more lightly than Irving Kristol. But the story of
   nascent Trotskyism leading to the neoconservative movement some 40
   years later has always given extra luster and irony to the tale. Some
   on the so-called paleo-right invest these roots with a great deal of
   meaning even today, claiming that Trotsky remains the guiding influence
   of neocons even for people who've probably never read a word of
   Trotsky's writings and were never themselves leftists or liberals, let
   alone Communists.
   
   While it might be fun to wade deep into the weeds to demonstrate the
   ludicrousness of this assertion, let me just say that of the scores of
   famous neocons I've met, none of them have ever expressed any fondness
   for Trotsky. He's never quoted as an authority in neocon op-eds or
   journals, and he's never invoked — save in jokes — in neocon debates or
   conferences. Still, there are some important points to make about this
   version of history. First, the folks who became known as
   neoconservatives may have been liberals who'd been "mugged by reality"
   (Irving Kristol's famous definition of a neocon), but most never called
   themselves neoconservatives, never studied Trotsky — let alone embraced
   his "theory of permanent revolution" — and many considered themselves
   honest liberals who stuck to their principles on civil rights as the
   Democratic party spun off into self-parody in the 1970s. Also, a few,
   such as Robert Nisbet and Bill Bennett, simply accepted the term
   conservative.
   
   Indeed, as late as 1979, Irving Kristol — invariably described as the
   "Godfather of Neoconservatism" — wrote an ironically titled essay
   "Confessions of a True, Self-Confessed 'Neoconservative.'" The essay
   was written largely in response to an antagonistic book written by a
   "democratic socialist" named Peter Steinfels (now with the New York
   Times), lamenting that these new conservatives were dangerously
   invigorating the Right. Kristol embraced the label, despite the
   pejorative intent behind it. "I myself have accepted the term," Kristol
   wrote, "perhaps because, having been named Irving, I am relatively
   indifferent to baptismal caprice. But I may be the only living
   self-confessed neoconservative, at large or in captivity."
   
   With this context in mind, to call neoconservatism a coherent
   "movement" of any kind ignores the fact that such transformations tend
   to be intensely individualistic. "When two neoconservatives meet they
   are more likely to argue with one another than to confer or conspire,"
   Irving Kristol wrote in 1979. And no neoconservative has ever
   contradicted James Q. Wilson's assertion that neocons have no common
   "manifesto, credo, religion, flag, anthem or secret handshake." This
   holds even truer today. The idea that, say, Hilton Kramer, Irving
   Kristol, Nathan Glazer, Richard Neuhaus, Michael Novak, and Jeanne
   Kirkpatrick all receive orders from some central Comintern or politburo
   — as Pat Buchanan is so fond of suggesting — is bizarre enough. The
   idea that they are all consulting in lockstep the collected works of
   Leon Trotsky is simply hysterical.
   
   Moreover, the transformative impact of the neocons has always been
   exaggerated. Yes, it's true that the neocons contributed new blood and
   new ideas to conservatism, but their chief contribution, as William F.
   Buckley has argued, derived from their ability to incorporate the
   language and methods of the social sciences into the conservative
   cause. It was not so much that the neocons had dramatically new
   opinions about the evils of the Soviet Union or the rise of secular
   humanism or — to a lesser extent — the threat of an overweening welfare
   state, it was that they employed new arguments using the
   still-respected language of social science which remained the lingua
   franca of the liberal Left. For example, "The law of unintended
   consequences" so widely hailed as an incandescently brilliant neocon
   formulation is really just a fancy restatement of fundamental Burkean
   conservatism. But when nice Jewish intellectuals and respected
   academics are simply repeating what other conservatives had said before
   them, the elite liberal media tends to pay attention.
   
   THE PALEO HICCUP
   And so did a few older conservatives. Hardly immune to the petty
   jealousies and ego-driven conflicts that plague every other
   political-intellectual enterprise, the rise of the neocons drove some
   conservatives to grumble. And when some of the now-admitted neocons
   around Commentary gained influence in the Reagan administration, a few
   marginal conservatives grew angry as the pie of intellectual jobs and
   funding got re-sliced in the neocons' favor. One might argue that
   because conservatives have so few posts at elite universities and jobs
   in government, funding from foundations takes on greater significance
   than would seem rational to outsiders. Or one might say that such
   conflicts are the natural product of an ideological movement achieving
   majority status. Just as political parties tend to become fratricidal
   when they lose the luxury and discipline of minority status,
   intellectual movements undergo growing pains when they take in
   productive immigrants.
   
   The conservative losers became a distinct faction when Ronald Reagan
   passed over the University of Dallas historian Mel Bradford in favor of
   Bill Bennett for the chairmanship of the National Endowment of the
   Humanities. As David Frum recently argued, the White House was put off
   by Bradford because 1981 was hardly a conducive year for Ronald Reagan
   to appoint an academic who had some decidedly un-P.C. things to say
   about the Civil War (many of the losers sunk themselves by refusing to
   let go of their lead-weight ideas about the Civil War and Jim Crow).
   Regardless, however the White House reached its decision, the losers —
   now beginning to call themselves "paleoconservatives" — believed the
   move was orchestrated by a cabal, comprised mostly of clever liberal
   Jews and faux conservatives.
   
   It's odd that such an event could be the catalyst for the creation an
   entire theology of grievance and outrage by the paleos. But pettiness,
   intellectual and personal, often drives politics. So, the more
   successful the neos became, the more bitter the paleos became. Pat
   Buchanan summarized not only the attitude but also the grace of the
   paleo "movement" when he wrote of the neos: "Like the fleas who
   conclude they are steering the dog, their relationship to the movement
   has always been parasitical."
   
   Today, "paleoconservatism" has become the real "neoconservatism," in
   that it is literally the newest form of conservatism out there,
   resembling very little the conservatism of William F. Buckley or Barry
   Goldwater or the rank-and-file of the Republican party. An even funnier
   irony is that in many respects paleoconservatism is more left wing than
   what we call neoconservatism. The reason this is funny is that so many
   self-described paleos view themselves as "further to the Right" than
   those they label neocons. But they need to explain why Pat Buchanan's
   public policies sound so liberal.
   
   For example, Patrick Buchanan complains that "compassionate
   conservatism" was a rip-off of his "conservatism of the heart." "I may
   charge him with plagiarism," Buchanan declared. Buchanan now favors
   caps on executive salaries, expansion of Medicare benefits, and high
   trade barriers. He fumes about the excesses of Wall Street and the free
   market. He writes in The Great Betrayal: "Better the occasional sins of
   a government acting out of the spirit of charity than the constant
   omissions of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference."
   That could easily come from It Takes A Village. Indeed, Buchanan's
   policies on immigration and culture and his support affirmative-action
   quotas for non-Jewish whites amount to what my colleague Ramesh Ponnuru
   calls "identity politics for white people." As for the lefty under- and
   over-tones of his foreign policy, David Frum has dealt with that in
   detail too.
   
   The opinions of the paleos matter if for no other reason than that
   they've largely been appropriated by the hard Left — Eric Alterman,
   Edward Said, The Nation — and increasingly by liberals like Michael
   Lind, Joshua Micah Marshall, Chris Matthews, Maureen Dowd, and Paul
   Krugman who shape popular perception through the elite media. All of
   these writers harp on a repeated theme, a small group of mostly Jewish
   intellectuals are manipulating a conservative president, the Republican
   party, and the American people for the sake of Israel and an
   ideological crusade. They don't all cite Trotsky's "theory of permanent
   revolution," but they all suggest the same thing. "What I fear is the
   neoconservatives," Matthews told an audience at Brown University. "They
   want to fight the North Koreans again. Iran. Iraq. Syria. Libya."
   Before long, "they'll go after China." Dowd: "Everyone thinks the Bush
   diplomacy on Iraq is a wreck. It isn't. It's a success because it was
   never meant to succeed." Marshall: "Ever since the neocons burst upon
   the public policy scene 30 years ago, their movement has been a
   marriage of moral idealism, military assertiveness, and deception."
   
   Eric Alterman writes, "the war has put Jews in the showcase as never
   before. Its primary intellectual architects — Paul Wolfowitz, Richard
   Perle...and Douglas J. Feith... — are all Jewish neoconservatives. So, too,
   are many of its prominent media cheerleaders, including William
   Kristol, Charles Krauthammer, and Marty Peretz. Joe Lieberman, the
   nation's most conspicuous Jewish politician, has been an avid booster."
   More Matthews, this time on Hardball: "Is there a neoconservative crowd
   operating within the Bush administration advancing the objectives of
   the neoconservative movement?" And: Why is President Bush "buying this
   neoconservative case for...war...This doesn't seem like an American kind of
   foreign policy." This isn't much different from Buchanan's much pithier
   references to "(Ariel) Sharon and the neoconservative War Party."
   
   NEXT: THE FOUR MYTHS OF NEOCONSERVATISM "

[Michael K.]

Thank You Robert Stockman for an intelligent response.

[rmstock]

  "The documentary Arguing the World famously
   focused on four of them: Irving Kristol (father of Bill), Nathan
   Glazer, Irving Howe (who recruited Irving to the Trotskyist cause), and
   Daniel Bell. [ ... ]"

Watch Daniel Bell (City College NY) speak of Columbia College NY only being for
the Protestant Elite (Gentile pronounced Gen-Thiel) and the occasional German Jew :

Arguing the World (1998) - FULL DOC
by rmstock , Published on Feb 14, 2016
"originally posted at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FgB8M2SL0fE "

[rmstock]

paleo-conservatives ... where does that come from ?
(Note : paleo could also be a contraction of pale-looser, pale-old
             or pale-order and neo a contraction of new-order
             However translation from Greek gives :  neo := new  and paleo := old
             but if one notices how Greece and the Greek language have been
             under siege since the founding of the Euro currency,  where at
             the same time Euro notes display Greek characters and symbols , one wonders ... )


Map of Asia and North America showing Beringia and the possible routes of Paleoindian people.
Native Americans:Prehistoric:Paleoindian:
Copyright © 2000 Illinois State Museum
http://www.museum.state.il.us/muslink/nat_amer/pre/htmls/paleo.html
  "[ ... ]

   
   Paleoindian spear points, Fulton County, Illinois.
   Note the groove or flute extending from the base of the point. This
   characteristic of Paleoindian points makes them distinctive when
   compared with points made at other times.

   The first people in North America arrived at least 14,000 years ago.
   Archaeologists call this period of North American history Paleoindian,
   meaning ancient Indian. Paleoindian people left behind distinctive
   spear points, such as the ones seen here, and other kinds of stone
   tools at Illinois camp sites. Archaeologists have yet to find charcoal
   from which they could get an absolute date for these camp sites, but
   spear points similar to those illustrated here have been found in other
   parts of North America in 10,000 to 12,000-year-old deposits.
   [ ... ]"

[Michael K.]

Whether or not Native Americans were paleoconservative, they certainly had lax immigration laws

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoconservatism_and_paleoconservatism
.
1988: The Heritage Foundation   

Russell Kirk found himself in the fray on December 15, 1988, when he gave a lecture at The Heritage Foundation. The title was "The Neoconservatives: An Endangered Species." As Chronicles editor Scott Richert described it,

[One line] helped define the emerging struggle between neoconservatives and paleoconservatives. "Not seldom has it seemed," Kirk declared, "as if some eminent Neoconservatives mistook Tel Aviv for the capital of the United States." A few years later, in another Heritage Foundation speech, Kirk repeated that line verbatim. In the wake of the Gulf War, which he had opposed, he clearly understood that those words carried even greater meaning.[29]

Midge Decter, a member of the Heritage Foundation's Board of Trustees and the director of the Committee for the Free World (and neoconservative commentator Norman Podhoretz's wife), called Kirk's line "a bloody outrage, a piece of anti-Semitism by Kirk that impugns the loyalty of neoconservatives." She claimed that Kirk "said people like my husband and me put the interest of Israel before the interest of the United States, that we have a dual loyalty."[30] She had previously denounced Joseph Sobran and the Intercollegiate Review symposium as anti-Semitic as well.[30] She told The New Republic, "It's this notion of a Christian civilization. You have to be part of it or you're not really fit to conserve anything. That's an old line and it's very ignorant."[30]

Conversely, paleocon Samuel Francis called Kirk's "Tel Aviv" remark "a wisecrack about the slavishly pro-Israel sympathies among neoconservatives."[30] He called Decter's response untrue,[30] "reckless" and "vitriolic." Furthermore, he argued that such a denunciation "always plays into the hands of the left, which is then able to repeat the charges and claim conservative endorsement of them."[4]...

1993: National Review   

A further event was the demotion and eventual firing in 1993 of Joseph Sobran from National Review, who had criticized American supporters of Israel. One such comment was that the New York Times "really ought to change its name to Holocaust Update."[35] Neoconservative Norman Podhoretz vehemently objected to such writing,[36] saying they were "anti-Semitic in themselves,"[37] His wife, Midge Decter, told Sobran she felt "shock and disgust—and contempt—at the discovery that you are little more than a crude and naked anti-Semite."[38]

Sobran himself claimed that founder William F. Buckley told him to "stop antagonizing the Zionist crowd," and Buckley accused him of libel and moral incapacitation.[39] Buckley had previously said that an outsider "might reasonably conclude that those [Israel] columns were written by a writer inclined to anti-Semitism."[40] Before his firing, Sobran discussed the issue in National Review, saying:

I'm responding to an obsession—a more or less official national obsession with a tiny, faraway socialist ethnocracy, which, I agree, ought to be a very minor concern of American policy-makers, but isn't. The orthodox view that Israel is a "reliable ally" is so brittle that a single maverick can ignite a frenzy. The reason, I repeat, is not that critics of Israel are so numerous, but that even one, as far as Israel's claque is concerned, is one too many. There is the terrible danger that the public may be more interested in what he has to say than in the party line the rest of the chorus is emitting.[41]

[rmstock]

OPERATION NEOCON : A bunch of pre-WWII Trotskyite's got together to
    prevent the looming gain in political force and impact for the
    conservatives from happening. This initiative gained foothold
    because numerous laws and legislature from previous socialist
    governments contained inherent blow-back, annotated by mean-old
    Irving as "The law of unintended consequences". Good-old Irving
    died around the same time due to cardiovascular disease. Not a bad
    timing for mean-old Irving as a potential dangerous dissenting
    insider fell away. The tragic fate of traditional conservatism was
    sealed during the Reagan presidency. When some of the now-admitted
    neocons around Commentary [magazine] gained influence in the Reagan
    administration, a few marginal conservatives grew angry as the pie
    of intellectual jobs and funding got re-sliced in the neocons'
    favor. Because conservatives retained so few posts at elite
    universities and jobs in government, funding from foundations took
    on greater significance than would seem rational to outsiders.
    After prominent funding and jobs fell away the paleo- prefix was
    swiftly coined.

[rmstock]

Whether or not Native Americans were paleoconservative, they certainly had lax immigration laws

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoconservatism_and_paleoconservatism

[ ... ]

Sobran himself claimed that founder William F. Buckley told him to "stop antagonizing the Zionist crowd," and Buckley accused him of libel and moral incapacitation.[39] Buckley had previously said that an outsider "might reasonably conclude that those [Israel] columns were written by a writer inclined to anti-Semitism."[40] Before his firing, Sobran discussed the issue in National Review, saying:

I'm responding to an obsession—a more or less official national obsession with a tiny, faraway socialist ethnocracy, which, I agree, ought to be a very minor concern of American policy-makers, but isn't. The orthodox view that Israel is a "reliable ally" is so brittle that a single maverick can ignite a frenzy. The reason, I repeat, is not that critics of Israel are so numerous, but that even one, as far as Israel's claque is concerned, is one too many. There is the terrible danger that the public may be more interested in what he has to say than in the party line the rest of the chorus is emitting.[41]

The wikipedia page points to [40] as being a dead link and caused by decaying linkrot : [5][dead link]
But i found the article at commentary magazine


Culture & Civilization
The Hate That Dare Not Speak Its Name
https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/the-hate-that-dare-not-speak-its-name/

  "Last March, in a special issue commemorating its 120th anniversary, the
   Nation published an article by the novelist Gore Vidal...
   
   Norman Podhoretz / Nov. 1, 1986
   
   Last March, in a special issue commemorating its 120th anniversary, the
   Nation published an article by the novelist Gore Vidal entitled "The
   Empire Lovers Strike Back" which impressed me and many other people as
   the most blatantly anti-Semitic outburst to have appeared in a
   respectable American periodical since World War II. The Nation is a
   left-wing (or, some would say, a liberal) magazine run by an editor,
   Victor Navasky, who is himself Jewish. Yet one reader (who happened not
   to be Jewish) wrote in a personal letter to Navasky that he could not
   recall encountering "that kind of naked anti-Semitism" even in papers
   of the lunatic-fringe Right which specialize in attacks on Jews; to
   find its like one had to go back to the Völkische Beobachter. Nor was
   he the only reader to be reminded of the Nazi gutter press. "I thought
   I was back in the 30's reading Der Stürmer," wrote another.
   
   Actually, however, it was not the crackpot racism of Julius Streicher
   that Vidal was drawing on, but sources closer to home. Prominent among
   these, I would guess, was Henry Adams, about whom Vidal has written
   admiringly and with whom he often seems to identify. Adams, as a
   descendant of two Presidents, was a preeminent member of the old
   American patriciate—the class to which Vidal also, if somewhat
   dubiously, claims to belong—and his resentment at the changes which
   came over the United States in the decades of industrialization and
   mass immigration after the Civil War knew no bounds. The country was
   being ruined, and Adams blamed it all on the Jews: "I tell you Rome was
   a blessed garden of paradise beside the rotten, unsexed, swindling,
   lying Jews, represented by Pierpont Morgan and the gang who have been
   manipulating the country for the last few years." It made no difference
   that J.P. Morgan was neither Jewish himself nor in any sense a
   representative of the Jews. For as Adams wrote in another of his
   letters: "The Jew has got into the soul. I see him—or her—now
   everywhere, and wherever he—or she—goes, there must remain a taint in
   the blood forever."
   
   In Vidal's diatribe there is no explicit mention of blood, but there is
   its functional equivalent in the idea that Jews born in the United
   States nevertheless remain foreigners living here by the gracious
   sufferance of the natives. Incorrigibly alien though the Jews may be,
   however, they exercise enormous and malevolent power over the politics
   of what Vidal, conjuring up the long discredited spirit of 19th-century
   nativism, does not hesitate to call "the host country."
   
   In the days of Henry Adams, and up until the establishment of the state
   of Israel, the great power of the Jews was supposedly used in the
   interests of world Jewry; today it is generally said to be deployed in
   the interest of the Jewish state, which Vidal, taking up this line,
   characterizes as a "predatory people . . . busy stealing other people's
   land in the name of an alien theocracy." Here is Vidal's version of how
   the conspiracy works:
   
      In order to get Treasury money for Israel (last year $3 billion),
      pro-Israel lobbyists must see to it that America's "the Russians are
      coming" squads are in place so that they can continue to frighten the
      American people into spending enormous sums for "defense," which also
      means the support of Israel in its never-ending wars against just about
      everyone.
   
   As befits this resurrection of the two classic themes of anti-Semitic
   literature—the Jew as alien and the Jew as the conspiratorial
   manipulator of malign power dangerous to everyone else—Vidal's tone is
   poisonous. His every word drips with contempt and hatred, and
   underlying it all is a strong note of menace. The Jews had better watch
   out if they wish "to stay on among us"—not that "we" will necessarily
   permit them to stay even if they do begin minding their manners. Their
   only purpose, after all, is "to make propaganda and raise money for
   Israel," thereby impoverishing the rest of us and bringing the world
   closer and closer to a nuclear war.
   
   _____________
   
   My own reaction on first reading this article was amazement: I could
   hardly believe my eyes. What amazed me was not the fact that I myself
   and my wife Midge Decter had been singled out by Vidal as
   representative examples of the phenomenon he was claiming to expose. I
   had known Vidal personally for many years, and had followed his career,
   so I was well aware that he believed in getting back at anyone who had
   the temerity to criticize him—a crime that Midge Decter and I had each
   recently committed. Thus, commenting in my syndicated weekly column on
   his joint appearance with Norman Mailer at a fund-raising evening for
   the forthcoming PEN Congress in New York, I had observed that (like
   most of their fellow writers) Mailer and Vidal were hostile "to the
   kind of country they imagine America has become in the past hundred
   years: oppressive and repressive both at home and abroad." I further
   noted that "the fame and the glory and the riches" they themselves had
   achieved "make nonsense of their defamatory caricature of America as a
   country given over body and soul to materialism, puritanism, and
   philistinism."
   
   Some weeks later in Contentions, the monthly publication of the
   Committee for the Free World (of which she is executive director),
   Midge Decter poked fun at Vidal's ideas about "the American empire."
   She also observed that Vidal had once again demonstrated that he "does
   not like his country."
   
   So a retaliatory strike, or even two, was to be expected from Vidal.
   Why then should I have been amazed by it when it came? For two reasons.
   The lesser was that Vidal, who had always seemed to glory in his
   hostility to America as a mark of superior intellect, virtue, and
   patrician ancestry, now felt driven to deny what we had said about that
   hostility. "Of course I like my country," he wrote. "After all, I'm its
   current biographer." For Vidal to describe his historical novels in
   this way was as if Lytton Strachey had pointed to Eminent Victorians as
   evidence of his great fondness for the generation of his father. And
   this piece of defensive dishonesty seemed all the more remarkable in
   that it was accompanied by a restatement of some of the very ideas ("We
   stole other people's land. We murdered many of the inhabitants. We
   imposed our religion—and rule—on the survivors," etc.) Midge Decter had
   cited in the article he was trying to rebut.
   
   But if I was surprised by the discovery that this famously fearless
   speaker of his own mind lacked the courage to call his own political
   convictions by their proper name, I was truly amazed by his
   introduction of the Jewish issue into an argument over the quality of
   American society and the nature of the American role in world affairs.
   
   Neither of the two pieces Vidal was pretending to answer so much as
   mentioned Israel or had anything whatever to do with the particular
   concerns of the American Jewish community. One of them was about the
   attitudes of the American literary world toward the United States; the
   other dealt with the American role in Mexico, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and
   the Philippines. By dragging the issue of Jewishness into such a
   discussion, Vidal was recklessly exposing himself to the charge of
   anti-Semitism. Who, after all, but an anti-Semite would attempt to
   refute an opposing political position by interpreting it as a Jewish
   conspiracy against the rest of "us"?
   
   But Vidal did more than merely introduce the Jewish question—as his
   anti-Semitic forebears liked to call it—into an unrelated discussion.
   He did more than sound the classic themes of anti-Semitic literature.
   He did all this without even bothering to conceal his true feelings.
   For example, in response to my statement that in America "the blessings
   of freedom and prosperity are greater and more widely shared than in
   any country known to human history," he said that I was wrapping myself
   in "our flag" and wearing it "like a designer kaftan." Again, in taking
   up Midge Decter's detailed challenge to his conception of American
   imperialism, Vidal countered that "She is [an Israeli] propagandist
   (paid for?), and that is what all this nonsense is about." And to make
   certain that his meaning would not be mistaken, he called us both an
   "Israeli Fifth Column."
   
   So it went, literally ad nauseam.
   
   _____________
   
   Now that a bit of time has passed, I can see in retrospect that I
   should have been as little surprised by the way Vidal struck back as I
   was by the sheer fact that he did.
   
   For one thing, I knew that he had long harbored feelings of resentment
   against what he considered the disproportionate influence of Jews in
   the American literary world. Many years earlier, he had joked about the
   domination of that world by a Jewish establishment of critics and
   editors which made room on the list of the important American novelists
   of his own generation only for an occasional "O.K. Goy" like himself.
   Yet as he undoubtedly recognized, Vidal had no standing (either then or
   now) as a novelist among serious literary critics of any ethnic
   background. What did make (and would continue to sustain) his
   reputation outside the world of commercial fiction and the television
   talk shows was his considerable talent as an essayist. But it was as a
   novelist that he clearly wished to be recognized, and he evidently
   blamed the Jewish establishment for preventing justice from being done
   to his work.
   
   Since it served as the entering wedge for the return to America of an
   old tradition of cultural anti-Semitism, it is worth pausing over the
   concept of an all-powerful Jewish literary establishment. Precisely
   because it had played a part in Berlin and Vienna in the 1920's in
   forming the climate of opinion to which the Nazis could later appeal,
   the constituent ideas of this tradition came to be regarded as so
   repellent and dangerous that they were shunned and repressed in the
   years after World War II. Yet these also turned out to be the very
   years in which Jews were for the first time making a deep mark in the
   American literary world. Thus the period from the late 40's to the late
   50's saw the emergence of novelists like Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud,
   and Philip Roth; of poets like Delmore Schwartz, Karl Shapiro, and
   Allen Ginsberg; of critics like Lionel Trilling, Alfred Kazin, and
   Irving Howe. And to top it all off, Partisan Review, many of whose
   editors and contributors were Jewish, also came in those years to be
   widely acknowledged as the leading American literary magazine.
   
   Naturally enough, this development, new and interesting as it was, gave
   rise to a good deal of sociological and historical discussion, and in
   the course of this discussion Jews were often said to have found a
   place in, or even to have taken over, the "establishment." Except for a
   degree of exaggeration, there was nothing wrong with such talk—until,
   that is, it began to be combined with the allegation that a
   conspiratorial network had been created between Jewish editors and
   Jewish critics for the purpose of pushing and promoting Jewish
   novelists and poets to the virtual exclusion of everyone else. At first
   this allegation was made only in shamefaced and guilty whispers. But
   eventually it achieved open expression in a Playboy interview with
   Truman Capote which was even more outspoken than Vidal's apparently
   whimsical complaint about discrimination against goyim. According to
   Capote, a "Jewish mafia" had taken control of "much of the literary
   scene through the influence of the quarterlies and intellectual
   magazines." He went on:
   
      All these publications are Jewish-dominated and this particular coterie
      employs them to make or break writers by advancing or withholding
      attention. . . . Bernard Malamud and Saul Bellow and Philip Roth and
      Isaac Bashevis Singer and Norman Mailer are all fine writers but
      they're not the only writers in the country, as the Jewish mafia would
      have us believe. I could give you a list of excellent writers . . .;
      the odds are you haven't heard of most of them for the simple reason
      that the Jewish mafia has systematically frozen them out of the
      literary scene.
   
   The great irony was that the Jewish editors and critics who were
   supposed to be pushing and promoting Jewish novelists and poets in this
   way were in reality their harshest, and often their only, critics. So
   it was that Bellow and the others were much more roughly treated in
   Partisan Review (and COMMENTARY) than they were anywhere else. Nor was
   it even remotely the case that except for an occasional "O.K. Goy," a
   writer had to be Jewish in order to get attention. In addition to
   Capote and Vidal themselves, who were hardly starving for attention,
   there were such widely read and discussed novelists as Carson
   McCullers, William Styron, John Updike, John Cheever, James Jones,
   Flannery O'Connor, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin; and there were
   such famous poets as Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Theodore Roethke,
   Randall Jarrell, Richard Wilbur, Elizabeth Bishop, and Sylvia Plath.
   All these writers, it might be added, were treated with much greater
   tenderness by critics like Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate, and Cleanth
   Brooks than their Jewish contemporaries could generally expect from
   such Jewish critics as Trilling, Howe, or Philip Rahv.
   
   About twenty years ago, I myself began trying to blow the whistle on
   the spreading notion of an all-powerful Jewish literary establishment
   by arguing that it was not only untrue but that it also represented the
   revival of a dangerous anti-Semitic canard. I did not, however, argue
   that Vidal and Capote, whose contribution to its revival I cited even
   then, were anti-Semitic. On the contrary, I exonerated them. I said
   that so effective had the taboo been on any open expression of
   hostility toward Jews since the fall of Hitler that Vidal and Capote,
   like almost everyone else in America of a certain age, were entirely
   unfamiliar with the traditional ideologies of anti-Semitism; and it was
   this very ignorance that had emboldened them to spread an idea they
   would have been ashamed of embracing if they had been aware of its
   history and pedigree.
   
   _____________
   
   I still think this may have been true of Capote (and I think it may
   also explain why so many people, including a few who are discussed
   below, are unable nowadays to recognize anti-Semitism when it hits them
   in the face). But it was obviously too kind to Vidal. As the years went
   by, the issue of Jewish literary power faded, but not Vidal's animus
   against Jews, which sought, and in due course found, a new outlet in
   the issue of Israel.
   
   Most critics of Israel are more concerned with attacking the state than
   with attacking the Jews as such. With Vidal it was the other way
   around. In fact, his loathing for Israel was no greater than his
   loathing for America; the one often even seemed a function of the
   other, with Israel's main crime being its alliance with and resemblance
   to the United States. Conversely, and no doubt with the example of
   Henry Adams to inspire him, he seemed to blame the putative decline of
   the United States on its susceptibility to the corruptions of Jewish
   influence, operating not only through the contemporary descendants of
   J.P. Morgan (symbolized for Vidal by the Chase Manhattan Bank) but also
   through the Pentagon and "our lunatic Right."
   
   This anti-Jewish animus occasionally peeped through Vidal's essays and
   interviews. Once, for example, he referred to Hilton Kramer, a critic
   who has rarely if ever dealt with Jewish topics or with Israel in his
   writings, as "the Tel Aviv Hilton." But as in this instance, Vidal was
   always careful to hide his anti-Jewish animus behind a campy façade,
   which allowed him, if challenged, to claim that he was after all only
   joking.
   
   Indeed, even when for the first time he came more or less fully out of
   the anti-Semitic closet, he still thought it the better part of
   prudence to protect himself by posing as the spokesman for a minority
   which was being persecuted by the Jews.
   
   The occasion, which served as a kind of dress rehearsal, or tryout, for
   "The Empire Lovers Strike Back," was an article called "Some Jews and
   the Gays" that was also published in the Nation and that was also aimed
   at Midge Decter and me—at her for the memoir she had written of summers
   spent in a largely homosexual community on Fire Island in the 1960's,
   at me for publishing it in COMMENTARY (under the title "The Boys on the
   Beach").1
   
   Unlike her later piece in Contentions, "The Boys on the Beach" made no
   reference to Vidal, but as an early pioneer of gay liberation, he took
   violent exception to some of the things it said about homosexuality. To
   be sure, time has not been kind to Vidal's article, which sneeringly
   dismisses the idea, propounded by "The Boys on the Beach" and now so
   grimly confirmed by the AIDS epidemic, that there is a suicidal impulse
   at work in homosexual promiscuity. Nevertheless, Vidal's sneers would
   have been fair enough if they had been confined to Midge Decter's
   knowledge of the subject, her judgment, her prose. But Vidal did not
   confine himself to these things; instead he broadened out into a blast
   against "a group of New York Jewish publicists" who
   
      know that should the bad times return, the Jews would be singled out
      yet again. Meanwhile, like so many Max Naumanns (Naumann was a German
      Jew who embraced Nazism), the new class passionately supports our
      ruling class—from the Chase Manhattan Bank to the Pentagon to the op-ed
      page of the Wall Street Journal—while holding in fierce contempt what
      they think our rulers hold in contempt: faggots, blacks, . . . and the
      poor. . . .
   
   The anti-Semitism here was brazenly obvious to anyone with eyes to see.
   But as Vidal correctly sensed in writing the article, and as the editor
   of the Nation probably figured in deciding to publish it, anyone
   speaking on behalf of an aggrieved minority can attack the Jews with
   relative impunity, especially if he turns the tables by representing
   them as the oppressors. Thus, just as the idea of a conspiracy against
   helpless Gentile writers by an all-powerful Jewish literary "mafia" had
   been tolerated in the early 60's, so a similar idea about the relation
   of blacks to Jews had been tolerated during the bitter New York City
   teachers' strike of 1968. Prior to this point, anyone making
   anti-Semitic statements had been in effect banished from respectable
   society and consigned to the lunatic fringe. But now, far from being
   penalized in this way, blacks could proclaim (as the African-American
   Teachers Forum did) that "The Jew" deliberately and "systematically"
   (the same word Capote used) "keeps our men from becoming teachers and
   principals and he keeps our children ignorant," and still be excused
   and justified by liberals, including Jewish liberals, and even rewarded
   with foundation grants. (A few who said such things, and worse, have
   since become prominent in New York politics.)
   
   The reaction to "Some Jews and the Gays" demonstrated that the same
   license was now being extended to homosexuals. Not only was there no
   outcry against this article after its appearance in the Nation; and not
   only did many people take the position that Vidal's rage was
   understandable and perhaps even warranted; but the collection of essays
   in which it was reprinted (under the title "Pink Triangle and Yellow
   Star") went on to win a National Book Critics Circle Award. When Ezra
   Pound's The Pisan Cantos, which also contained anti-Semitic passages,
   was awarded the Bollingen Prize in 1949, there were protests even from
   some who considered Pound a great poet. But when a book by Vidal, a
   writer no one considers great, was awarded a literary prize, no
   protests were heard, and some reviewers even singled out the offending
   essay for special praise.
   
   Obviously, then, both Vidal and the editor of the Nation had been right
   in their assessment of the risks involved in publishing "Some Jews and
   the Gays." Even the caution shown in the choice of title proved to be
   unnecessary.
   
   _____________
   
   With this experience behind him, Vidal must surely have assumed that he
   could get away with the same anti-Semitic trick when he decided to play
   it again in "The Empire Lovers Strike Back." Yet I at first thought
   that this time he and the Nation had miscalculated.
   
   It was one thing to attack "some" Jews for criticizing homosexuality;
   and if the attack spilled over into abusive remarks about Jews in
   general, well, that could be dismissed as a forgivable expression of
   that cleansing "rage" everyone has come to expect from oppressed
   minorities fighting for their rights. But it was quite another thing to
   make abusive charges against Jews for supporting Israel. Here no
   pretense at limiting the attack to "some" Jews (that is, the
   neoconservatives) could provide protection, since virtually all
   American Jews, including those who detest the neoconservatives as much
   as Vidal does, were bound to feel themselves equally implicated. If, as
   Vidal charged, their support of Israel proved that Jews of a
   neoconservative bent did not really belong in America, then neither did
   liberal Jews or radical Jews who also support Israel; and if supporting
   Israel made the neoconservatives into a "fifth column" (which is to
   say, agents of a foreign power and even traitors), there was no way the
   rest of the Jewish community, which was at least as pro-Israel as any
   neoconservative, could escape being tarred with the same accusation.
   
   If Vidal had made a mistake, so, I thought, had the Nation. In recent
   years, under Victor Navasky, the Nation had regularly published
   articles by such virulently anti-Israel propagandists as Edward Said (a
   member of the PLO National Council) and Alexander Cockburn. But while
   attacking Israel, and doing everything in its power to delegitimize the
   Jewish state, the Nation had always piously affirmed Israel's right to
   exist. Yet here, in a special anniversary issue, the magazine was
   opening its pages to a piece advocating a cutoff of all American aid to
   Israel—which was tantamount to calling for the destruction of the state
   by its Soviet-armed enemies.
   
   This was not all. Like the PLO itself, which it supports, the Nation
   had always insisted on the distinction between anti-Semitism and
   anti-Zionism. Yet by publishing an anti-Zionist piece that was so
   obviously anti-Semitic, it cast serious doubt on its own belief in the
   reality of this distinction.
   
   For these reasons, I was confident that a storm of protest would be
   unleashed against Vidal and the Nation, and I therefore resisted the
   urgings of many people that I "do something." Obviously, as an
   interested party, I was not in the best position to make the case that
   had to be made. Nor was I in the least concerned about defending myself
   personally. Although I am as thin-skinned as the next man, I took
   Vidal's article not as a personal attack on me at all but as an attack
   on Jews in general. Consequently, what I most hoped for was not that
   others would spring to my defense, but that a protest would be mounted
   by people sympathetic to the Nation's left-wing political position who
   would say that while they detested everything Norman Podhoretz, Midge
   Decter, and all the other neo-conservatives stood for, and while
   nothing made them happier than seeing neoconservatives raked over the
   coals, they were outraged by the re-introduction of anti-Semitism into
   American political discourse in general and their own political
   community in particular.
   
   And indeed, about a week after Vidal's piece appeared, just such a
   protest came from the very heartland of that community, the Village
   Voice. Under the rubric "Jew-Roasting," its press critic, Geoffrey
   Stokes, wrote:
   
      Happy 120th Birthday, Nationl On the other hand, what the hell was Gore
      Vidal's anti-Semitic screed doing in the special anniversary issue? Not
      even clever, . . . Vidal's piece . . . had the unsettling effect of
      making me briefly sympathetic to Podhoretz.
   
   Gratifying though this was, however, it was followed by complete
   silence from the Left. In the Nation itself, three issues went by with
   no letters to the editor, and when an inquiry was made to its editorial
   offices, the answer was that the mail on Vidal had not been unusually
   heavy, that it was split evenly pro and con, and that some of it would
   eventually be run.
   
   Meanwhile, wherever I went in those weeks, I would ask the people I
   encountered about the Vidal piece, only to find that hardly anyone had
   read it. This included people who had attended the anniversary party at
   which more than 3,000 copies of the offending issue had been
   distributed, as well as other self-professed friends of and subscribers
   to the Nation. It was good to learn that the Nation (which claims a
   circulation of 70,000), had such a small readership, but I did not
   think the Vidal piece should be allowed to sneak by unnoticed. In my
   view, ignoring it would only be taken by other anti-Semites as a
   license to resume saying things on which they had mercifully been
   choking for so long.
   
   _____________
   
   It was at this point that a letter was sent to twenty-nine friends and
   supporters of the Nation whose names were selected both from the
   magazine's masthead and from the congratulatory messages which had
   appeared in the anniversary issue. They were: Floyd Abrams; Bella
   Abzug; Leonard Bernstein; Norman Birnbaum; Bill Bradley; Arthur L.
   Carter; Ramsey Clark; Arthur C. Danto; Osborn Elliott; Richard Falk;
   Frances FitzGerald; Fred Friendly; Seymour Hersh; Arthur Hertzberg;
   Charlayne Hunter-Gault; Peter Jennings; Edward Kennedy; Edward I. Koch;
   Elinor Langer; Eugene McCarthy; Sidney Morgenbesser; Aryeh Neier;
   Robert Silvers; Paul Simon; Gloria Steinern; Rose Styron; Mike Wallace;
   Tom Wicker; Roger Wilkins.
   
   It would later be reported in the press that I had demanded that these
   people repudiate the Vidal article. But what the letter, signed not by
   me but by Marion Magid, the managing editor of COMMENTARY, actually
   said was this:
   
      In connection with a projected article, we are asking a number of
      friends and supporters of the Nation whether they have seen fit to
      protest against the contribution by Gore Vidal to the 120th anniversary
      issue ("The Empire Lovers Strike Back"). Could you let us know whether
      you have made such a protest, either in private or in a letter for
      publication?
   
   In the four weeks that followed the mailing of this letter we received
   only seven replies. By that time the Nation had also begun running
   letters in its correspondence columns, of which three were from people
   who had been on our list. Eliminating overlaps,2 this came to a total
   of eight out of twenty-nine. Of the eight, only five (the attorney
   Floyd Abrams; Professor Richard Falk of Princeton; Rabbi Arthur
   Hertzberg; Professor Sidney Morgenbesser of Columbia; and Aryeh Neier,
   the human-rights activist) said they saw anything wrong with the
   article or with the Nation's decision to publish it.
   
   Of the others, two (the sociologist Norman Birnbaum and Tom Wicker of
   the New York Times), responding directly to Marion Magid, attacked her
   letter as an impropriety, while either saying nothing about Vidal at
   all (Birnbaum) or explicitly denying that his article was anti-Semitic
   (Wicker). The third, the journalist Roger Wilkins, writing to the
   Nation for publication, called Vidal's piece "splendid." By contrast,
   Wilkins said, the attacks on it as anti-Semitic were "ugly mumblings,"
   a species of McCarthyism, and a threat to the First Amendment.
   
   Striking a note that would be heard over and over again from defenders
   of Vidal, Wilkins declared:
   
      Scoundrels have many last refuges. One is to attack as anti-Semitic any
      criticism of the policies of any given government of Israel or of any
      supporters of Israel, no matter how frothing those supporters may be.
   
   Not content with defending Vidal against the charge of anti-Semitism,
   Wilkins even denied that his piece was anti-Israel. Like himself,
   Wilkins wrote, Vidal "apparently" believed "that one can criticize an
   Israeli government policy or one advocated by a supporter of Israel as
   being both dangerous to peace and to Israel's security without being
   either anti-Israel or anti-Semitic."
   
   In other words, the critics of Israel are allowed to say anything they
   want, no matter how vile, about the state and its supporters, but it is
   McCarthyism and a threat to the First Amendment to criticize them.
   
   
   To put the same idea another way: it is permissible to make
   anti-Semitic statements, but it is impermissible to call such
   statements anti-Semitic.
   
   _____________
   
   But what of the twenty-one who did not respond to Marion Magid's
   letter? What did their silence mean? Some weeks later, after the
   controversy had attracted a great deal of publicity, three of them
   (Fred Friendly of the Columbia School of Journalism; the writer Elinor
   Langer; and Senator Paul Simon of Illinois) finally got around to
   communicating their dislike of Vidal's piece either to Marion Magid or
   to me. All three, however, said that they felt no compelling reason to
   protest against its publication.
   
   As for the other eighteen, one can only speculate. It may be that the
   politicians among them (Mayor Koch, Senator Bradley, Senator Kennedy)
   were never shown the letter by whoever handles their mail. This may
   also have been the case with the media personalities (Peter Jennings of
   ABC, Mike Wallace of CBS, Charlayne Hunter-Gault of PBS) or with a busy
   celebrity like Leonard Bernstein. It is even possible that they never
   saw Vidal's article (a copy of which, by the way, had been enclosed
   with the letter).
   
   Nevertheless, whatever the reasons might be, one glaring and ugly fact
   remained: a large number of prominent liberals and leftists who had
   publicly associated themselves in one way or another with the Nation,
   and whose names had appeared in one capacity or another in the very
   issue containing so blatantly anti-Semitic an article, had not been
   sufficiently outraged to register disapproval or to express a protest.
   Nor did many others on the Left respond by (to borrow an image Vidal
   had used in congratulating himself for candor) calling a spade a spade:
   by, that is, describing Vidal's article as a foul anti-Semitic outburst
   and expressing dismay or disgust at the fact that a magazine
   professedly devoted to liberal ideals should have given house room to
   such an article.
   
   A few did. Stipulating that "Knocking Podhoretz up the side of the head
   for an inane foreign policy is like shooting fish in a barrel," one
   liberal reader still characterized Vidal's article as a "leering,
   taunting, look-at-how-clever-I-am anti-Semitic assault." He also blamed
   the Nation's editor for permitting Vidal to "break the bounds of
   discourse."
   
   Another reader, dissociating himself even more vigorously from me and
   Midge Decter, asked whether Vidal was "sallying forth to paste yellow
   stars on those of us 'foreigners' whose Americanism is questionable
   because we like Israel?"
   
   A third, summing up the case, wrote:
   
      The implication—that American Jews who support Israel are traitors to
      their country—is pure anti-Semitism. . . . I do not like
      neoconservativism and I do not like Norman Podhoretz. I don't like him,
      as a Jew, as an American, as a Zionist, and as a leftist. But I'd
      rather see his published ideas criticized fairly than to see him
      accused of treason without evidence, especially when this accusation
      extends to me.
   
   Yet in the weeks immediately following the publication of Vidal's
   article, these three (or stretching a point to include Floyd Abrams,
   four) were the only letters to the Nation from liberals or leftists
   that seemed to me commensurate with the provocation.
   
   Of the other two protests from the Left published by the Nation, one
   came from Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg. A former president of the American
   Jewish Congress, Rabbi Hertzberg had been heard to rail privately
   against the article and had promised to denounce it in the strongest
   possible terms. In the end, however, all he managed to produce was a
   letter in which he described the piece as a "personal quarrel with
   Norman Podhoretz and Midge Decter," said that he was "delighted" with
   Vidal's complimentary remarks about Peace Now, and could not even bring
   himself to use the term "anti-Semitism" at all. As for the second such
   liberal protest, while denouncing Vidal "for exhibiting a snide
   anti-Jewishness," it spent more space explaining that the American
   Jewish Committee, despite its sponsorship of COMMENTARY, was not, as
   Vidal had ignorantly charged in passing, an organization of "the far
   Right."
   
   Neither this letter, nor Hertzberg's, was written in the name of the
   Jewish organizations with which their authors were associated; nor did
   any other Jewish organization speak up in these first few weeks (though
   both the American Jewish Committee and the Anti-Defamation League would
   subsequently be heard from). A reporter for an Israeli newspaper, who
   later set out to find out why the Jewish defense agencies had been so
   quiet, discovered that the feeling was that "Norman can take care of
   himself." But the issue was not "Norman," and to define it in those
   terms was to do what Hertzberg was the first (but, as we shall see, far
   from the last) to do: it was to turn an anti-Semitic assault into "a
   personal quarrel" and thereby to trivialize it. From there it was only
   a short step to the prominent lay Jewish leader who went around saying
   that "Podhoretz and Vidal deserve each other." This idea that
   anti-Semitism and a protest against anti-Semitism are on an equal moral
   footing would also be echoed in the weeks ahead. But not usually by
   people carrying a mandate from the American Jewish community to defend
   it against anti-Semitism.
   
   _____________
   
   After nearly a month of waiting for a serious protest to materialize,
   it finally dawned on me that I had been wrong to think that Vidal and
   the Nation had made a mistake from their own point of view with "The
   Empire Lovers Strike Back." If so, things were even more ominous than
   they had seemed at first. It was bad enough that a presumably reputable
   author should see fit to write a blatantly anti-Semitic article; it was
   even worse that a magazine professing devotion to liberal values should
   see fit to publish such an article; but what was worst of all was that
   so few of the magazine's friends and admirers had been willing to raise
   their voices against it. Therefore, in the column I now decided I had
   no choice but to write, it was the theme of liberal silence I
   emphasized. It was, I concluded, "a silence as deep as the moral pit
   into which the Nation itself has fallen in welcoming the unabashed
   return to American political discourse of a murderous poison against
   which the only antidote is the revulsion of decent people."
   
   A few days before this column was published, first in the New York Post
   and then in the Washington Post and a number of other papers throughout
   the United States, the New Republic ran an editorial denouncing Vidal's
   article as anti-Semitic on the ground that his target was not just the
   Jewish state but Jews in general, and that his accusations against
   Podhoretz and Decter as aliens, and even "in essence" traitors, applied
   "by extension [to] all American Jews who support Israel."
   
   The New Republic likes to regard itself as a liberal magazine, and in
   some sense it is. But its hatred of Soviet totalitarianism, its belief
   in the need for American power to contain Soviet expansionism, and its
   strong support of Israel—not to mention a host of differences over
   domestic issues—have placed it politically on the opposite side of the
   Nation in recent years. Consequently, its editorial on Vidal could no
   more be taken as coming from the Nation's own political community than
   an earlier protest by the neoconservative Catholic writer Michael Novak
   (who in his syndicated column had been the first to call attention to
   "a piece of bigotry and nativism by Gore Vidal worthy of the
   anti-Semitism of the KKK") or the indignant letter to the Nation by the
   New Right activist Paul Weyrich.
   
   In any event, to judge by the reaction to its editorial, which seemed
   to attract more attention than the Vidal article itself had done, the
   New Republic is much more widely and more carefully read than the
   Nation. No sooner had it appeared than I began to get calls and letters
   requesting more information; and whereas before it was I who had had to
   ask people about the Vidal article, only to discover that very few had
   seen or heard about it, now everywhere I went, everyone, it seemed, was
   talking about it. And when, hard upon the New Republic editorial, my
   own column appeared, the talk became even louder and more insistent.
   
   Nor was this second wave of reaction confined to talk. Before the storm
   finally subsided two months or so later, at least twenty pieces had
   been published about the episode in American newspapers and magazines,
   and nearly half as many again in other countries, including England,
   France, Germany, Australia, and Israel.
   
   From this second wave of reaction I learned that there is something
   worse than silence in the face of anti-Semitism, and that is a willful
   blindness in the face of it. Here the blindness took three different
   but overlapping forms. One was the outright denial that Vidal's piece
   was anti-Semitic. The second was to treat the article as part of a
   longstanding personal feud between Vidal and me. The third was to
   affect a lofty neutrality as between two equally unpleasant and
   unacceptable points of view.
   
   _____________
   
   Leading the pack of those who simply denied that Vidal's piece was
   anti-Semitic were Vidal and Navasky themselves. In the first wave,
   replying to the letters on his piece in the Nation itself, Vidal had
   not only ignored the charge of anti-Semitism but had adopted the
   strategy of heaping abuse on the correspondents who leveled it at him.
   One of these correspondents, he said, "needs psychiatric attention of a
   sort that I cannot provide."3 Another he advised to "join the Israeli
   Army." To a third, he cited "the hysterical tone of these letters" as
   evidence of the strength of his argument. To a fourth he countered that
   "the Podhoretzes are doing more to arouse the essential anti-Semitism
   of the American people than anyone since Father Coughlin."
   
   As for Navasky, he bemoaned the "sad fact" that "when a Gentile
   criticizes Israel or raises fundamental questions about its connection
   to American Jewry he or she is often said to be anti-Semitic; when a
   Jew does so he or she is said to be self-hating." Going so far as to
   concede that "such ugly accusations" were "understandable in view of
   Vidal's provocative framing of the issue," Navasky still insisted that
   they arose out of a misreading of Vidal's "idiom of irony"—and irony,
   of course, "should not be read literally." Instead of being called bad
   names, Vidal should be acclaimed for his courage in "violating the
   taboo that forbids the discussion of the relationship of the American
   Jewish community to the state of Israel. . . ."
   
   This was too much for Irving Howe, the editor of the socialist magazine
   Dissent. Reaffirming his often stated distaste for Podhoretz and
   Decter, and referring to Navasky as a "decent and humane man," Howe
   nevertheless not only lashed into Vidal's "racist diatribe" ("It is
   many years since I have read anything quite like this in a serious
   magazine"); he called the Editor's Note in defense of it "still more
   shocking" than the fact that the Nation had printed Vidal's piece:
   
      Whatever are the Nation editors talking about? What taboo? Many of us
      have publicly been engaged in precisely this discussion for years now,
      and one need only look through the files of various magazines—Left,
      Right, and Center—to see how fierce this debate has been.
   
      Vidal's piece aroused disgust not because of any issue it raised or
      taboo it violated, but because of the terms in which it was
      couched—terms about as close to anti-Semitism as anyone not an openly
      declared anti-Semite would reach.
   
   Navasky's Editor's Note was also too much for the veteran Old Leftist
   Morris U. Schappes, the editor of Jewish Currents. Schappes "admonished
   the Nation as a devoted friend" for its failure to perceive that
   Vidal's article was "smelly with anti-Semitism" and for defending it on
   the false ground that Vidal had raised questions about the relation of
   American Jews to Israel that no one else had previously dared to ask.
   
   Unchastened by rebukes even from such friendly quarters, Navasky stuck
   throughout to the same line. But this time, in the second wave, Vidal
   himself did deign to notice that he was being charged with
   anti-Semitism. In a call made to the Washington Post after my column
   had appeared there, he stated:
   
      Anyone who says he is not an anti-Semite is probably one, and so I
      shall not dignify the dread Norman (Poddy)4 Podhoretz's
      characterization of me in these pages as "a virulent anti-Semite" with
      a defense where no offense of that nature exists or has ever existed.
   
   In addition to thus fingering himself here by doing precisely what he
   says an anti-Semite would do, Vidal requested that the Post reprint his
   Nation article. This request the Post thereupon honored so that, it
   explained, readers could answer for themselves the question posed in
   its headline: "Was the Vidal Article Anti-Semitic?" (Will the Post, the
   New Republic subsequently wondered, "reprint the writings of Louis
   Farrakhan or Lyndon LaRouche when next its readers seem puzzled by a
   columnist's criticisms?")
   
   _____________
   
   
   First out of the gate in the race to join in denying that Vidal's piece
   was anti-Semitic sprang Edwin M. Yoder, Jr., another Washington Post
   columnist. Yoder, in his courteous Southern way, allowed as how it was
   "unfair" of Vidal to charge me with being "more interested in Israel
   than in this country" (is that what he charged me with?) but "The truth
   is that Norman Podhoretz asked for it, not only by firing the first
   shot at Vidal in connection with an entirely different subject, but by
   professing an ostentatious indifference to early American history."
   
   What Yoder is referring to here is a story Vidal told in his article
   about a remark I am supposed to have made to him twenty-five years ago,
   to the effect that to me, as the child of immigrants, the Civil War was
   as remote as the War of the Roses. Though I have no memory of making
   the remark, I may well have said something like it. But whether or not
   I did—and if I did, I was certainly putting Vidal on—Yoder's notion
   that I deserved to be answered with an anti-Semitic onslaught
   twenty-five years later takes the breath away. But of course Vidal's
   onslaught was not, in Yoder's view, anti-Semitic at all. It was only
   "mischievous and cutting . . ., in Vidal's best polemical manner."
   
   No more than Roger Wilkins before him was Yoder satisfied with
   defending Vidal against the charge of anti-Semitism. He also
   counterattacked with the accusation that I, like many (most?) American
   Jews, have tried to silence any and all criticism of Israel by
   denouncing such criticism as anti-Semitic, even while pretending
   otherwise:
   
      Podhoretz graciously concedes that "it is possible to criticize Israel
      without being anti-Semitic." Thanks, we needed that. But has Podhoretz
      noticed that if one is critical of an Israeli policy one may be accused
      of attacking Israel's legitimacy? And, just beyond that, of being a
      crypto anti-Semite? It was that very logic that drove Podhoretz to
      mistake Vidal's hard-edged teasing for anti-Semitism.
   
   A similar argument was advanced by another columnist, William Pfaff,
   writing in the International Herald-Tribune, who moreover took it upon
   himself to deliver a lecture on how "reasonable people" should conduct
   themselves in discussing the subject of Israel. He graciously conceded
   in his turn that Jews have a right to support Israel "without having
   imputed to them a lack of patriotism toward the country of which they
   are citizens." His main concern, however, was clearly to establish the
   right of "an American to criticize or oppose the policies of the state
   of Israel . . . without an anti-Semitic motivation being imputed."
   
   Once again, then, the issue was shifted from the appearance of an
   anti-Semitic article in a respectable left-wing magazine to the alleged
   efforts by people like me to silence any and all criticism of Israel.
   On this point Pfaff let it be known that he knew whereof he spoke: "I
   have . . . been myself denounced by Mr. Podhoretz as anti-Semitic
   because of things I wrote about Israel's conduct during the siege of
   Beirut in 1982," he told his readers. What he did not tell them was
   that in one of these "things" he had begun by asserting that in
   Israel's conduct "Hitler's work goes on," and he had concluded by
   predicting that Hitler might soon "find rest in Hell" through "the
   knowledge that the Jews themselves, in Israel, have finally accepted
   his own way of looking at things." In my article "J'Accuse,"5 I did
   indeed denounce these words (not Pfaff himself) as anti-Semitic.
   Nicholas von Hoffman, another columnist who had used similar words, had
   the good grace to withdraw them in response to the same criticism. But
   not Pfaff—who, in addition, had and has the gall to feel aggrieved and
   victimized by the fact that he was called to account.
   
   Since Pfaff (like Yoder a decent man who is intelligent enough to know
   better) remains convinced that comparing Israel to Nazi Germany
   represents a "reasonable" application to the Jewish state "of the same
   moral and political judgments as one applies to the conduct of other
   states," it is no wonder that all he can see in Vidal is an innocent
   "critic" of Israel like himself. What he does not see is that it is he,
   and Yoder and Wilkins and Wicker, who erase the line between legitimate
   criticism of Israel and anti-Semitism by their unwillingness or
   inability to distinguish between the former and a clear case of the
   latter like the Vidal article (or like his own comparisons of Israel
   with Nazi Germany).
   
   _____________
   
   
   If denial, was one form taken by this blindness to anti-Semitism, a
   second was the treatment of Vidal's article as part of a longstanding
   personal feud with me and/or Midge Decter. "A Big-League Literary
   Feud," announced the headline of a story in Newsweek which went on to
   describe it as "the sort of literary quarrel that had everything going
   for it," with "the prospect of more vitriolic prose, more character
   assassinations, and, in all likelihood, more broken friendships."
   
   Several newspapers also played the story largely for its gossip value.
   "The dirty little war of words between writer Gore Vidal and
   conservative columnist Norman Podhoretz appears to have gone nuclear,"
   brightly chirped a reporter in the Washington Post Style section. "Long
   bombarding each other with verbal abuse, Vidal and Podhoretz have now
   engaged in an exchange that is by all accounts ugly, burying the issues
   in an atomic barrage of name-calling."
   
   From this kind of trivialization the third form of denial naturally
   followed. On National Public Radio, Rod MacLeish declared a plague on
   both our houses for "polluting" public discourse, but he was more
   incensed at me than at Vidal. Unjustly to accuse someone of
   anti-Semitism, he said, is almost as base as anti-Semitism itself. But
   he was so busy explaining to me that it is not anti-Semitic to
   criticize the economic policies [sic!] of the Israeli government that
   he never got around to explaining how what he himself described as
   Vidal's appeal to "an ancient American bigotry" differed from
   anti-Semitism.
   
   The same trick of morally equating Vidal's anti-Semitism with my
   protest against it was used by Jody Powell in the Los Angeles Times.
   Deploring all the attention being paid to this "grand wrist-flapping
   dither" at a time when "deficits and exchange rates" were crying out
   for discussion, Powell proceeded to devote an entire column to it
   himself:
   
      What we have here is a trio of aging, self-righteous ideologues bent on
      exposing the absurdities of their intellectual configuration to all who
      can stomach the spectacle. What emerges is that they are more alike
      than different.
   
   Powell therefore "steadfastly refused to choose" because "it is
   impossible to attack one without appearing to be allied with the other."
   
   But this was only impossible because Powell also "steadfastly refused"
   to recognize anti-Semitism when he saw it; to those not so blinded,
   like Paul Berman of the Village Voice (which in the second wave as in
   the first acquitted itself more honorably than any other left-wing
   publication), there was no question about which side to take as between
   an anti-Semitic article and a protest against it:
   
      Who but my discombobulated friends at the Nation could so bollix things
      that right-minded leftists have no choice but to rise to the defense of
      Norman Podhoretz?
   
      I rise. . . . The Nation had no business publishing Gore Vidal's
      spleen. . . . And why must the editors of the Nation, having made the
      mistake of publishing this horrendous stuff in the first place, pass it
      off as "irony"?
   
   _____________
   
   
   In describing both waves of reaction to the Vidal article, I have
   omitted the protests that came from people outside the circle of
   friends and supporters of the Nation—writers like William Safire, R.
   Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., Jeane Kirkpatrick, Richard John Neuhaus, Jeffrey
   Hart, and David Evanier who are neither liberals nor radicals and whose
   general political views are closer to mine than to the Nation's.6 For
   such people, protesting against Vidal and the Nation was as
   unproblematic as it was hard for leftists who were reluctant to give
   political aid and comfort to an opponent like me. But as a diabolical
   fate would have it, the conservative political community was soon to
   face a similar test of its own.
   
   Joseph Sobran is a syndicated columnist, a commentator on the CBS radio
   series "Spectrum," and a senior editor of National Review (a magazine
   whose standing on the Right is comparable to, though much higher than,
   the position on the Left occupied by the Nation). For some years now,
   and especially since the Lebanon war, when he too wrote a few "things"
   about Israel's "conduct," he has been increasingly unfriendly to the
   Jewish state. During the Bitburg controversy, in defending the
   President's decision to visit a German military cemetery in which SS
   men were buried, he also struck a number of people as decidedly
   unfriendly to the American Jewish community. Remonstrations were made
   to him in private about the insensitivity to Jewish concerns reflected
   in his Bitburg columns, and he was even caricatured as a latter-day
   Nazi in a small-town paper which had carried those columns.
   
   To all this he responded by defending himself in print against what he
   indignantly denounced as Jewish attempts to intimidate and silence him.
   He would not, he vowed, be intimidated; he would not be silenced. And
   he was as good as his word. Over the following months, he seemed to let
   no opportunity slip for attacking Israel and American support for
   Israel. As bitter an opponent of the Left as can be found, he was even
   driven to seize on a book attacking Zionism from the Left as a vehicle
   for the amazing declaration that he had never seen a good case made,
   except by Jews (whose arguments, of course, could not be trusted), for
   the American alliance with Israel.
   
   Nor was this the only instance when the Jewish issue drove Sobran into
   making common cause with people or positions he would normally be the
   first to attack. The most egregious example was his criticism of the
   American strike on Libya. This was so uncharacteristic a stance for a
   hardline conservative hawk like Sobran to take, and so inconsistent
   with his general world view, that it could only cause his regular
   readers to wonder how he had come to such a pass. Demonstrating his
   fearless disregard of the "gas-chamber rhetoric" that would no doubt be
   thrown at him, Sobran provided the materials for dispelling that wonder:
   
      The Israeli lobby is, of course, the most powerful lobby in America.
      That is ultimately why Congress so quickly endorsed a direct military
      strike against Libya, while it quibbles endlessly about whether aid to
      the contras in Nicaragua might lead, someday, to American military
      involvement in Central America. Qaddafi is an enemy of Israel.
      Communist Nicaragua isn't. It's an enemy of America, period.
   
      So we fight Qaddafi, and maybe, the administration hints, Syria and
      Iran as well. Ostensibly the issue is "terrorism," but that sounds more
      and more like a surrogate word for enemies of Israel.
   
   Having thus explained how Congress was manipulated by the Jews into
   approving the Libyan strike, he went on in another column to explain
   why the New York Times also applauded Reagan for this misconceived
   action:
   
      On the issue of Libya, the Times sounds like Soldier of Fortune
      magazine. It even chides our allies for ingratitude in failing to
      support Reagan's action: "The failure to cooperate against Libya plants
      poisonous seeds of disintegration."
   
      The Times didn't use that kind of language at the moment when it might
      have done so more appropriately: When Israel was discovered to have
      been paying a U.S. citizen for U.S. military secrets. Our European
      allies are our allies for the purpose of resisting Communism, not
      terrorism. But the Times, one of America's most ardently Zionist
      newspapers, understands that Israel has its own reasons for desiring to
      pit the United States against the whole Arab world. So bombs away.
   
   Never mind the ignorance and/or misrepresentation here. Never mind that
   the Sandinistas—who are so close to the PLO that some of them were
   trained in PLO camps before the overthrow of Somoza; who still receive
   help from the PLO today; and who have declared that "the PLO cause is
   the cause of the Sandinistas"—are enemies of Israel. Never mind that
   the New York Times, far from being "ardently Zionist," is by a wide
   margin editorially more critical of Israel than approving. Sobran will
   not permit such elementary facts to stand in the way of his theory that
   the Jews first manipulated Reagan into bombing Libya, and then
   manipulated the Congress and the media into applauding him for doing so.
   
   As if all this were not enough, Sobran took the occasion of the Pope's
   visit to a synagogue in Rome earlier this year to dredge up canards
   against the Jews as a people and Judaism as a religion that had rarely
   been heard since the Middle Ages (though it is possible that Sobran
   found them in the writings of such Edwardian Catholics as Hilaire
   Belloc and G.K. Chesterton who seem to play a part for him as mentors
   in anti-Semitism analogous to the one Henry Adams plays for Vidal):
   
      Millions of Jews chose to migrate to Christian Europe. They lived there
      for centuries. If Christians were sometimes hostile to Jews, that
      worked two ways. Some rabbinical authorities held that it was
      permissible to cheat and even kill Gentiles. Although the great Jewish
      theologian Moses Maimonides insisted that it was as wrong to kill a
      Gentile as a Jew, it seems strange that this should ever have been a
      matter of controversy, and Maimonides was in some quarters regarded as
      a heretic.
   
   Again, never mind the ignorance here. Never mind the preposterous lies
   about rabbinical permission to cheat and kill Gentiles or the
   suggestion that the most revered Jewish thinker of post-biblical times
   ("From Moses to Moses," Jews say of him, "none has arisen like Moses")
   was regarded as a heretic because he considered it wrong for a Jew to
   kill a Gentile. Never mind the ludicrous moral judgment that (in
   another passage of the same column) equates Christian "hostility" to
   Jews—manifested over the centuries in mass expulsions, pogroms, forced
   conversions, and denial of civil or political rights—with the less than
   respectful Jewish attitude toward Jesus that prevailed in those same
   centuries. The point to be stressed is that in this column, although
   Israel comes in at the beginning and the end, the issue is not Zionism,
   or rather anti-Zionism, but Jews and Judaism throughout the ages.
   Anti-Semitism, in other words.
   
   _____________
   
   
   For me personally, as well as for Midge Decter, a difficult problem was
   posed by the growing but finally inescapable conclusion that
   anti-Semitism was at work in those Sobran columns. In contrast to Vidal
   (with whom in general he has, to put it mildly, nothing in common),
   Sobran did not single us out for attack. On the contrary, in one of the
   very columns from which I have quoted, he defended us against Vidal's
   charge of disloyalty to America. Not that this did anything to mitigate
   his own hostility to Israel; it did not, in fact, even prevent him from
   playing on the theme of dual loyalty himself: "As their frequently
   duplicitous behavior shows, the Israelis know very well the difference
   between their interests and ours. It's Americans who love Israel who
   don't know it yet." Then he used a column of mine (which he might have
   noticed gave the lie all by itself to the charge that I consider any
   and all criticism of Israel to be ipso facto anti-Semitic) to drive the
   dual-loyalty point home:
   
      When the Pollard spy story broke, Podhoretz wrote that American Jews
      had been doubly betrayed—as Americans and as Jews. If so, they have
      been doubly betrayed again—and again. It's time they stood up for their
      rights against their unreliable ally.
   
   But if there was no problem by now over how to characterize Sobran's
   writings about Israel and the Jewish community in general, there was a
   problem of what to do about it. With the Vidal controversy still
   raging, it seemed reckless to open up, so to speak, a second front. On
   the other hand, to let Sobran's pieces go by without protest might only
   make it seem that while neoconservatives were all too ready to attack
   anti-Semitism on the Left, we were perfectly content to tolerate it on
   the Right. It was Midge Decter who hit on the idea of writing a letter
   to Sobran himself and to send copies to a number of mutual friends and
   political allies. Her letter was very tough. It opened by accusing
   Sobran of being "little more than a crude and naked anti-Semite" and it
   proceeded to document this charge (pretty much along the lines of the
   foregoing account).
   
   Mutatis mutandis, then, just as members of Vidal's political community
   had been asked for their reaction to his piece in the Nation, so
   Sobran's political friends were now being asked how they felt about the
   anti-Semitic sentiments to which he had been giving expression in his
   column. But there the similarity ends.
   
   In contrast to the Vidal-Nation case, none of the clearly anti-Semitic
   Sobran columns had appeared in National Review. In spite of this, the
   editor of National Review, William F. Buckley, Jr., responded to Midge
   Decter's letter, and to the urgings of nearly all the people to whom it
   had been sent, by deciding to publish an editorial dissociating the
   magazine from Sobran on this issue. This editorial, written by Buckley
   himself with the concurrence of all the other senior editors of
   National Review, affirmed that while his colleagues were sure that
   Sobran was not in his heart an anti-Semite, anyone who did not really
   know him "might reasonably conclude that those columns were written by
   a writer inclined to anti-Semitism. . . . Accordingly, I here
   dissociate myself and my colleagues from what we view as the obstinate
   tendentiousness of Joe Sobran's recent columns." Buckley also expressed
   confidence that Sobran would in the future respect the "welcome"
   structure of "prevailing taboos concerning Israel and the Jews."
   
   It would be pleasant to report that this was an end of it.
   Unfortunately, Sobran himself and a number of his other friends and
   allies sprang to his defense in terms very similar to those used by
   Vidal and his apologists. They denied that the columns in question
   were. anti-Semitic; they complained that anyone who criticizes Israel
   is smeared with accusations of anti-Semitism; they charged that the
   Jewish lobby was trying to silence them; they invoked the First
   Amendment. One of them even compared me with Jesse Jackson: as Jackson
   has tried to silence opposition with charges of racism, so I have tried
   to silence it with charges of anti-Semitism.7
   
   _____________
   
   
   From Vidal's political friends on the Left, then, mainly denial, and
   from the editor of the Nation, stonewalling. From Sobran's political
   friends on the Right, mostly outrage, and from the editor of National
   Review, dissociation and repudiation of anti-Semitism.
   
   What emerges from the contrast between the two cases is further
   evidence that anti-Semitism has largely if not entirely been banished
   from its traditional home on the Right, and that today, especially in
   the guise of anti-Zionism, it is meeting with more and more toleration,
   and sometimes even approval, on the Left.
   
   Meanwhile liberals and other leftists, including large segments of the
   American Jewish community, go on refusing to face these immensely
   important facts. If they should therefore also go on failing to
   undertake the job of housecleaning that conservatives like Buckley have
   long been doing within their own political community, the poison of
   anti-Semitism will continue spreading through the American air, with
   what consequences no one can foresee.
   
   _____________
   
   
   1 September 1980.
   
   2 The figures I gave in the newspaper column I later wrote were
   slightly off because I forgot to take overlapping into account.
   
   3 This was not the only time the issue of psychiatric disorder came up.
   The New Republic's otherwise excellent editorial was marred by a
   concluding sentence stating that Vidal was "ready for the funny farm."
   But there is nothing in the least crazy about Vidal, and to suggest
   that he needs psychiatric treatment is to diminish his responsibility
   for his foul anti-Semitic ideas. In using the phrase, however, the New
   Republic inadvertently provoked a moment of morbid comic relief in the
   form of the following letter from John Hinckley, Jr., written from the
   psychiatric hospital to which he has been confined since shooting
   President Reagan: "I resent the fact that you equate 'anti-Semitism'
   with insanity. In the first place, Gore Vidal is anti-Zionist, not
   anti-Jewish, and in the second place, being opposed to Zionism (which
   is both racist and militaristic) is not a sign of mental illness. If
   anything, it is patriotic. . . . The easiest way to defame someone and
   his opinions is to label him as 'loony' and 'ready for the funny farm.'
   It happens to me all the time. The opinions of Gore Vidal and myself
   are just as valid as yours, and just because we disagree with you does
   not mean we are crazy."
   
   4 This is what Vidal called me throughout his Nation article. It is a
   nickname invented by him, not one by which I have ever been known by
   anyone else.
   
   5 COMMENTARY, September 1982.
   
   6 One such writer, however, Richard Grenier, agreed with those on the
   Left who denied that Vidal's article was anti-Semitic. Vidal's
   hostility to Jews was, he said in his column in the Washington Times,
   rooted in other passions—social snobbery, anti-democratic elitism, and
   envy. Perhaps. But anti-Semitic ideas are and should be identified as
   anti-Semitic, no matter what may lie behind them.
   
   7 In perhaps the most bizarre—and, from the Jewish point of view,
   scandalous—turn of events in this entire history, the Washington Jewish
   Week reprinted this article (with the parts about Jesse Jackson cut
   out). Thus a liberal Jewish editor joined forces with a right-wing
   extremist in whitewashing two of the vilest anti-Semitic outbursts in
   forty years and in attacking me for protesting against them—adding the
   usual lie that "the victims of such attacks by Podhoretz have been many
   and various, and their only apparent sin has been criticism of Israel
   and its policies." And this was sought out and reprinted in a Jewish
   paper!"

[Michael K.]

http://www.npiamerica.org/research/category/neoconservatism-as-a-jewish-movement

Neoconservatism as a Jewish Movement

December 10, 2004.  Kevin McDonald

Various quotes only, since the article is like ten pages long:

"Indeed, by far the best predictor of neoconservative attitudes, on foreign policy at least, is what the political right in Israel deems is in Israel's best interests."

"NON-JEWISH PARTICIPATION IN NEOCONSERVATISM

As with the other Jewish intellectual and political movements, non-Jews have been welcomed into the movement and often given highly visible roles as the public face of the movement. This of course lessens the perception that the movement is indeed a Jewish movement, and it makes excellent psychological sense to have the spokespersons for any movement resemble the people they are trying to convince. That's why Ahmed Chalabi (a Shiite Iraqi, a student of early neocon theorist Albert Wohlstetter, and a close personal associate of prominent neocons' including Richard Perle) was the neocons' choice to lead postwar Iraq.[12] There are many examples—including Freud's famous comments on needing a non-Jew to represent psychoanalysis (he got Carl Jung for a time until Jung balked at the role, and then Ernest Jones). Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict were the most publicly recognized Boasian anthropologists, and there were a great many non-Jewish leftists and pro-immigration advocates who were promoted to visible positions in Jewish-dominated movements—and sometimes resented their role.[13] Albert Lindemann describes non-Jews among the leaders of the Bolshevik revolution as "jewified non-Jews"—"a term, freed of its ugly connotations, [that] might be used to underline an often overlooked point: Even in Russia there were some non-Jews, whether Bolsheviks or not, who respected Jews, praised them abundantly, imitated them, cared about their welfare, and established intimate friendships or romantic liaisons with them."[14]"

"Another common theme of Jewish intellectual and political movements has been the involvement and clout of the wider Jewish community. While the prominent neoconservatives represent a small fraction of the American Jewish community, there is little doubt that the organized Jewish community shares their commitment to the Likud Party in Israel ..."

"Most important, the main Jewish activist organizations have been quick to condemn those who have noted the Jewish commitments of the neoconservative activists in the Bush administration or seen the hand of the Jewish community in pushing for war against Iraq and other Arab countries. For example, the ADL's Abraham Foxman singled out Pat Buchanan, Joe Sobran, Rep. James Moran, Chris Matthews of MSNBC, James O. Goldsborough (a columnist for the San Diego Union-Tribune), columnist Robert Novak, and writer Ian Buruma as subscribers to "a canard that America's going to war has little to do with disarming Saddam, but everything to do with Jews, the 'Jewish lobby' and the hawkish Jewish members of the Bush Administration who, according to this chorus, will favor any war that benefits Israel."[32] Similarly, when Senator Ernest F. Hollings (D-SC) made a speech in the U.S. Senate and wrote a newspaper op-ed piece which claimed the war in Iraq was motivated by "President Bush's policy to secure Israel" and advanced by a handful of Jewish officials and opinion leaders, Abe Foxman of the ADL stated, "when the debate veers into anti-Jewish stereotyping, it is tantamount to scapegoating and an appeal to ethnic hatred.... This is reminiscent of age-old, anti-Semitic canards about a Jewish conspiracy to control and manipulate government."[33] Despite negative comments from Jewish activist organizations, and a great deal of coverage in the American Jewish press, there were no articles on this story in any of the major U.S. national newspapers.[34]"

"All twentieth century Jewish intellectual and political movements stem from the deep involvement of Jews with the left. However, beginning in the late 1920s, when the followers of Leon Trotsky broke off from the mainstream communist movement, the Jewish left has not been unified. By all accounts the major figure linking Trotsky and the neoconservative movement is Max Shachtman, a Jew born in Poland in 1904 but brought to the United States as an infant. Like other leftists during the 1920s, Shachtman was enthusiastic about the Soviet Union, writing in 1923 that it was "a brilliant red light in the darkness of capitalist gloom."[44] Shachtman began as a follower of James P. Cannon,[45] who became converted to Trotsky's view that the Soviet Union should actively foment revolution."

"Trotskyists took seriously the Marxist idea that the proletarian socialist revolution should occur first in the economically advanced societies of the West rather than in backward Russia or China. They also thought that a revolution only in Russia was doomed to failure because the success of socialism in Russia depended inevitably on the world economy. The conclusion of this line of logic was that Marxists should advocate a permanent revolution that would sweep away capitalism completely rather than concentrate on building socialism in the Soviet Union."

"As they saw it, the world was gravely threatened by a totalitarian Soviet Union with aggressive outposts around the world and a Third World corrupted by vicious anti-Semitism.... A major project of Moynihan, Kirkpatrick, and other neoconservatives in and out of government was the defense of Israel.... By the mid-1970s, Israel was also under fire from the Soviet Union and the Third World and much of the West. The United States was the one exception, and the neoconservatives—stressing that Israel was a just, democratic state constantly threatened by vicious and aggressive neighbors—sought to deepen and strengthen this support.[76]"

"In general, neoconservatives have been far more attached to Jewish interests, and especially the interests of Israel, than to any other identifiable interest. It is revealing that as the war in Iraq has become an expensive quagmire in both lives and money, Bill Kristol has become willing to abandon the neoconservatives' alliance with traditional conservatives by allying with John Kerry and the Democratic Party. This is because Kerry has promised to increase troop strength and retain the commitment to Iraq, and because Kerry has declared that he has "a 100 percent record—not a 99, a 100 percent record—of sustaining the special relationship and friendship that we have with Israel."[108]"

"It is revealing that, while neocons generally lost interest in Africa, Latin America, and Eastern Europe after these areas were no longer points of contention in the Cold War, there was no lessening of interest in the Middle East.[132] "

"Strauss believed that liberal, individualistic modern Western societies were best for Judaism because the illiberal alternatives of both the left (communism) and right (Nazism) were anti-Jewish. (By the 1950s, anti-Semitism had become an important force in the Soviet Union.) However, Strauss believed that liberal societies were not ideal because they tended to break down group loyalties and group distinctiveness—both qualities essential to the survival of Judaism. And he thought that there is a danger that, like the Weimar Republic, liberal societies could give way to fascism, especially if traditional religious and cultural forms were overturned; hence the neoconservative attitude that traditional religious forms among non-Jews are good for Jews.[139] "

"Strauss understood that inequalities among humans were inevitable and advocated rule by an aristocratic elite of philosopher kings forced to pay lip service to the traditional religious and political beliefs of the masses while not believing them.[144] This elite should pursue its vision of the common good but must reach out to others using deception and manipulation to achieve its goals. As Bill Kristol has described it, elites have the duty to guide public opinion, but "one of the main teachings [of Strauss] is that all politics are limited and none of them is really based on the truth."[145] Amore cynical characterization is provided by Stephen Holmes: "The good society, on this model, consists of the sedated masses, the gentlemen rulers, the promising puppies, and the philosophers who pursue knowledge, manipulate the gentlemen, anesthetize the people, and housebreak the most talented young"[146]"

"Strauss described the need for an external exoteric language directed at outsiders, and an internal esoteric language directed at ingroup members.[148] A general feature of the movements I have studied is that this Straussian prescription has been followed: Issues are framed in language that appeals to non-Jews rather than explicitly in terms of Jewish interests, although Jewish interests always remain in the background if one cares to look a little deeper. The most common rhetoric used by Jewish intellectual and political movements has been the language of moral universalism and the language of science—languages that appeal to the educated elites of the modern Western world.[149] But beneath the rhetoric it is easy to find statements describing the Jewish agendas of the principal actors. And the language of moral universalism (e.g., advocating democracy as a universal moral imperative) goes hand in hand with a narrow Jewish moral particularism (altering governments that represent a danger to Israel)."

"The simple logic is as follows: Based on the data presented here, it is quite clear that Strauss understood that neither communism nor fascism was good for Jews in the long run. But democracy cannot be trusted given that Weimar ended with Hitler. A solution is to advocate democracy and the trappings of traditional religious culture, but managed by an elite able to manipulate the masses via control of the media and academic discourse. Jews have a long history as an elite in Western societies, so it is not in the least surprising that Strauss would advocate an ideal society in which Jews would be a central component of the elite. In my view, this is Strauss's esoteric message. The exoteric message is the universalist veneer promulgated by Strauss's disciples—a common enough pattern among Jewish intellectual and political movements."

[rmstock]

Culture & Civilization
The Hate That Dare Not Speak Its Name
https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/the-hate-that-dare-not-speak-its-name/

  "Last March, in a special issue commemorating its 120th anniversary, the
   Nation published an article by the novelist Gore Vidal...
   
   Norman Podhoretz / Nov. 1, 1986
   
  "[ ... ]
   
   Joseph Sobran is a syndicated columnist, a commentator on the CBS radio
   series "Spectrum," and a senior editor of National Review (a magazine
   whose standing on the Right is comparable to, though much higher than,
   the position on the Left occupied by the Nation). For some years now,
   and especially since the Lebanon war, when he too wrote a few "things"
   about Israel's "conduct," he has been increasingly unfriendly to the
   Jewish state. During the Bitburg controversy, in defending the
   President's decision to visit a German military cemetery in which SS
   men were buried, he also struck a number of people as decidedly
   unfriendly to the American Jewish community. Remonstrations were made
   to him in private about the insensitivity to Jewish concerns reflected
   in his Bitburg columns, and he was even caricatured as a latter-day
   Nazi in a small-town paper which had carried those columns.
   
   To all this he responded by defending himself in print against what he
   indignantly denounced as Jewish attempts to intimidate and silence him.
   He would not, he vowed, be intimidated; he would not be silenced. And
   he was as good as his word. Over the following months, he seemed to let
   no opportunity slip for attacking Israel and American support for
   Israel. As bitter an opponent of the Left as can be found, he was even
   driven to seize on a book attacking Zionism from the Left as a vehicle
   for the amazing declaration that he had never seen a good case made,
   except by Jews (whose arguments, of course, could not be trusted), for
   the American alliance with Israel.
   
   Nor was this the only instance when the Jewish issue drove Sobran into
   making common cause with people or positions he would normally be the
   first to attack. The most egregious example was his criticism of the
   American strike on Libya. This was so uncharacteristic a stance for a
   hardline conservative hawk like Sobran to take, and so inconsistent
   with his general world view, that it could only cause his regular
   readers to wonder how he had come to such a pass. Demonstrating his
   fearless disregard of the "gas-chamber rhetoric" that would no doubt be
   thrown at him, Sobran provided the materials for dispelling that wonder:
   
      The Israeli lobby is, of course, the most powerful lobby in America.
      That is ultimately why Congress so quickly endorsed a direct military
      strike against Libya, while it quibbles endlessly about whether aid to
      the contras in Nicaragua might lead, someday, to American military
      involvement in Central America. Qaddafi is an enemy of Israel.
      Communist Nicaragua isn't. It's an enemy of America, period.
   
      So we fight Qaddafi, and maybe, the administration hints, Syria and
      Iran as well. Ostensibly the issue is "terrorism," but that sounds more
      and more like a surrogate word for enemies of Israel.
   
   Having thus explained how Congress was manipulated by the Jews into
   approving the Libyan strike, he went on in another column to explain
   why the New York Times also applauded Reagan for this misconceived
   action:
   
      On the issue of Libya, the Times sounds like Soldier of Fortune
      magazine. It even chides our allies for ingratitude in failing to
      support Reagan's action: "The failure to cooperate against Libya plants
      poisonous seeds of disintegration."
   
      The Times didn't use that kind of language at the moment when it might
      have done so more appropriately: When Israel was discovered to have
      been paying a U.S. citizen for U.S. military secrets. Our European
      allies are our allies for the purpose of resisting Communism, not
      terrorism. But the Times, one of America's most ardently Zionist
      newspapers, understands that Israel has its own reasons for desiring to
      pit the United States against the whole Arab world. So bombs away.
   
   [ ... ]"

So again a conservative journalist in a top position of his trade is put down
by the anti-semitism card, because he questioned the 1986 bombing campaign
of Ronald Reagan on Libya, as retaliation to the 1986 Berlin disco terrorist
attack 10 days earlier by reportedly Libyan terrorists. It was Ronald Reagan who
pushed this through, where the entire Reagan cabinet was against this kind of
aggressiveness :


President Reagan consults bipartisan Congress members about the strike.

We have seen such bold push-through action by a leader not so
long ago, when German Bundes Chancellor Angela Merkel violated
the EU Dublin treaty on immigration and singlehandedly took in
over 1 million refugees, of which no proper background and checks
could be made.

Strangely enough both Reagan and Merkel have a lot in common.  Angela
Merkel grew up in the DDR (East-Germany) and is told to have been a
Stasi agent, who later became ridiculous powerful inside the
Center-Right Christian Democratic political party, the CDU in Souther
Germany. As you can see thats pretty odd for a Stasi girl who was never
baptized as a youth. The same holds for Ronald Reagan, who was called
"Red Ronnie" by people in the know. According Anthony Hilder [1] :

   "Ronald Reagan is not a conservative. Ronald Reagan is
    so far left. Ehh can I say this? Ronald Reagan is not a conservative.
    He never was a conservative. he is not a conservative.
    He never will be a conservative, in the early days they used to call
    him red ronny. It's as simple as that. He was a United World
    Federalist for 13 years. He was in the LA committee for a democratic
    party Sympolicy which was associated with the Institute of Pacific
    Relations, which was listed as an instrument of the Soviet Union.
    This guy is so far left, he makes Fidel Castro look like a
    member of the John Birch Society."

which was also observed decades earlier by Myron C. Fagan [2].
Shortly after Fagan's audio lecture on "The Illuminati and the CFR
Conspiracy" was published he made a new recording titled "Red Stars
Over Hollywood" which outlines the background of how and why he got
informed about the CFR. Ronald Reagan turns out to also have been a Red
Star over Hollywood, as mentioned by Myron C. Fagan at 01:03:00 :

  "One of the most shameless of these Renegade's was Ronald Reagan, then
   president of the screen actors guild, which at the 1947 hearings in
   Washington was proclaimed to be the most vicious hot-bed of communists
   in the entire film industry. The same Reagan now is Governor of
   California and would-be Candidate for the Presidency"

When collecting the evidence present after only 10 days have passed
in April 1986 when the Berlin Disco bombing happened, how much
trouble would Red Commie Ronnie have had in fabricating evidence
against Libya and Qaddafi ? I would suggest that a false flag
attack by the East-Berlin Stasi department is entirely possible.

[1] Anthony J. Hilder about 'Red Ronny'
   by Robert M. Stockmann, 15 Apr 2009
   http://crashrecovery.org/fagan/#anthony.hilder
[2] The Illuminati and the Counsel on Foreign Relations, by Myron C. Fagan
   introduction.
   http://crashrecovery.org/fagan/

[rmstock]

News » Finance
Bill White: The purge of Joe Sobran and the Axis of Evil
How letting the neo-cons gain control has brought the Nation to the brink of war
07.02.2002 | Source: Pravda.Ru
http://english.pravda.ru/news/business/finance/07-02-2002/25510-0/

  "[Bill's note: This will be in the "columnist" section of Pravda as soon
   as they get that section working -- later today, hopefully. Those who
   would like to thank Mr Sobran for being interviewed for this article
   can reach him at joe@sobran.com.]
   
   "Korea, as a regime arming with missiles and weapons of mass
   destruction, while starving its citizens. Iran, aggressively pursues
   these weapons and exports terror, while an unelected few repress the
   Iranian people's hope for freedom. Iraq continues to flaunt its
   hostility toward America and to support terror.
   
    "States like these and their terrorist allies constitute an axis of
   evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world."
   
    So read George Bush in his State of the Union address January 29,
   2002. The effects of those words were immediate across the globe. Few
   nations -- whether they were America's friends or not, failed to
   denounce him. Germany and France cautioned him against attacking Iraq.
   Iraq ordered a general mobilization of its reserves. Iran responded by
   saying it will not yield to aggression -- and is now said to have
   opened its borders to allow al Qaeda members fleeing Afghanistan to go
   to Lebanon to join Iranian backed forces. North Korea denounced the
   attacks and by some press reports got its missiles and artillery ready
   -- just in case it needed to barrage the 38,000 US troops stationed
   just a few miles south of its border.
   
    George the Second may have been mouthing these words, but it was not
   he who wrote them. As former New York Post editor Scott McConnell put
   it in his February 5, 2002 opinion column:
   
    "The phrase, I heard in Washington last week, came from the glib pen
   of speechwriter David Frum, the former Weekly Standard editor."
   
    That name rang a bell. David Frum. Your humble correspondent flipped
   back to "In Pursuit of Anti-Semitism Chapter II", from the National
   Review of March 16, 1992, the second in a series of long, rambling
   articles by an obviously terrified Bill Buckley, who was at the time
   trying to save himself from the nasty words being hurled in his
   direction because he continued to publish Joe Sobran -- a Catholic
   columnist, critical of Israel, under attack from the «neo-conservative»
   Jewish-Trotskyite vanguardists of the Republican Party. When Buckley
   published his own attack on Sobran, stating:
   
    "Forgetting for the moment those who believe that every point of view
   should be evenhandedly ventilated, the question to ask here is: In a
   civilized culture, should someone who is, in the opinion of the
   reasonable community, an anti-Semite be removed from public forums?"
   
    Before concluding "yes" and then rambling on for several pages using
   the words "Joe Sobran" and "anti-Semite" in close proximity to each
   other repeatedly, but never having the courage to either outright link
   them or outright deny the link. He didn't have to be explicit though --
   the linkage was made, the process started -- an in October 1993, Sobran
   would be removed from National Review after 21 years of service, for,
   as Sobran told Pravda:
   
    "directly disputing [with Buckley] ... and for saying he was 'jumpy
   about Jews.'"
   
    David Frum had been one of many of the "neo-conservative" Trotskyites
   to write back, telling Buckley:
   
    "I wanted you to know that in this house [your essay] was greeted with
   applause and thanks."
   
    Of course, Buckley's abandonment of two of the fortresses of the
   Republican Old Right -- Joe Sobran and Pat Buchanan -- had been the
   beginning of the end of the Republican Party as a final bastion for
   semi-independent American politicians. Buckley, the old man of the
   right, the former CIA agent who was now the chief propagandist for the
   CIA's international interests, had caved to the other lobby that runs
   the country, and his shame was being paraded on the pages of National
   Review just as the shame of the Old Man of the Mountain was paraded
   before the Mongol hordes after the 13th Century defeat of the
   Assassins. And like the Old Man of the Mountain, these modern Mongols
   didn't shed his royal blood -- instead they contented themselves with
   smothering him.
   
    Ten years ago the Anglo-philic Protestant establishment in the
   Republican Party and their Old Right largely Catholic allies were
   attacked by ex-communists who had infiltrated their ranks. Instead of
   fighting back, the WASPs yielded, lacking the courage to purge these
   infiltrators, and fearing their prominent roles in the media and in
   shaping public opinion. When the Jewish neo-cons first came to the
   Anglo-Saxon Republicans, pretending to embrace Republican ideals, the
   Republicans embraced back, and gave the neo-cons a share of the leading
   positions. Now these Zionists had become entrenched, and used the
   positions they had been given to lead a purge.
   
    Soon others would invade the National Review -- Michael Ledeen, the
   Mossad-CIA link during the Iran-Contra scandal; Jonah Goldberg, who's
   wife Jessica Gavora would be working with John Ashcroft as the moving
   force behind his police state; and the old evils -- the Podhoretzes and
   the Krauthammers and the Daniel Pipes and all the rest of the sewage of
   the American bourgeoisie would rush in once Buckley had removed the
   "Old Right" grates.
   
    A decade after their initial revolt these infiltrators are pulling the
   ropes behind George Bush, wrapping his lips around their words, "Axis
   of Evil," and moving the nation, and the earth, closer to the brink of
   World War III. A deadly combination has formed -- the National Review
   's staff now consists half of men who make profit off of war, and half
   of men who are driven ideologically to seek imperialist war for their
   national socialist homeland of Israel. Together, they have brought the
   world to where it stands now -- on the brink. Even with the extent of
   their evil not played out, it is deep -- how deep? Deeper than
   Atlantis.
   
    One Lonely Little Guy
   
    Joe Sobran is a man generous in spirit, even to his enemies. When
   asked to comment on how he felt about being purged by Jews from
   Republican ranks, he told Pravda:
   
    "The problem isn't Jews; it's gutless gentiles."
   
    And despite being the victim of racist, religiously biased, and
   generally hateful attacks, he has persisted in writings denunciations
   of anti-Semitism. As he stated plainly in that same issue of National
   Review as Buckley, above:
   
    "[A] man who makes an anti-Semitic argument, one that arouses or
   appeals to hostility towards Jews ... is in the wrong."
   
    But there is no doubt that the men who drove Sobran from National
   Review 's pages were not only Jewish, but exclusively so. As he wrote
   later in a syndicated column entitled "How I Was Fired By Bill
   Buckley":
   
    "Norman Podhoretz and his wife Midge Decter accused me of
   anti-Semitism."
   
    And they weren't the only ones. Marty Peretz, then editor of the New
   Republic, and a man who, a few years ago, when a friend of a friend's
   used to date the daughter of one of his associates, had an award for
   political advocacy from the State of Israel sitting on his bookshelf
   next to a rack of rare editions of Spengler and pre-World War II German
   nationalist thinkers, joined in the attack. According to Buckley,
   writing in the infamous December 30, 1991 edition of the National
   Review:
   
    "Peretz is terminally displeased with Sobran"
   
    It didn't stop there. It was an organized campaign of betrayal against
   an unsuspecting political coalition partner comparable to betrayal of
   the Mensheviks in the Bolshevik coup of 1917. Richard Cohen, now a
   proponent of a national ID card, wrote in the Washington Post:
   
    "In Sobran's case, the conduct in question is his writings, and those
   put his anti-Semitism beyond a doubt."
   
    Alan Dershowitz, now a major advocate of torture and the repeal of the
   Fifth and Eighth Amendments, wrote in the second National Review on the
   subject:
   
    "Private publications have a First Amendment right not to publish
   objectionable views."
   
    But what about when all the publications given access to the federally
   limited number of television and radio broadcasters are all own by the
   same small clique? Can it be said that corporations through the means
   of cultural production undermine the First Amendment?
   
    AM Rosenthal of the New York Times also wrote a letter to National
   Review, denying that the simultaneous attacks on Sobran and Buchanan
   represented the "old Jew-conspiracy bit," stating that his purely
   innocent and virtuous motivation in attacking the Old Right, while
   prompted by the ADL, had nothing to do with the ADL. As he said,
   
    "I am delighted to thank the ADL for alerting me"
   
    despite the fact that this of course had nothing to do with what he
   published.
   
    And what started this? It was an article by Sobran questioning the
   wisdom of US-Israeli policy, expressing outrage at the Israeli invasion
   of Beiruit, and questioning why it was necessary for Jewish leaders to
   be constantly affirming to the rest of us that it is as wrong to kill a
   non-Jew as it is to kill a Jew. As Sobran put it in his April 1986
   National Review column:
   
    "Although the great theologian Moses Maimonides insisted that it is as
   wrong to kill a gentile as a Jew, it seems strange that this should
   ever have been a matter of controversy ... Maimonides has been regarded
   in some quarters as heretical."
   
    Sobran also made the mistake of pointing out the treason of John
   Pollard -- treason that was facilitated by the man who take his place
   as senior editor, Michael Ledeen, who got Pollard his job in the
   Department of the Navy. And his comments on the Friedman censorship
   case were embarrassing to the same AM Rosenthal that would launch his
   infamous Pearl Harbor-like attack on Buchanan later that year. As
   Buckley wrote in the December 30 National Review:
   
    "Sobran wrote that Pulitzer Prize-winning Thomas Friedman of the New
   York Times had been suppressed by [AM Rosenthal] when he 'wrote a
   path-breaking story describing the massive Israeli bombing of Beiruit
   as 'indiscriminate'"
   
    And it was also during that time that Israel destroyed a 14-story
   skyscraper with bombs because they believed that Yassir Arafat's PLO
   was meeting there -- just as Mohammed Atta and his crew would destroy
   the American World Trade Center a decade and a half later.
   
    The Wimp
   
    On June 9, 1994 the Wanderer, a Catholic magazine, printed the
   following statement from Joe Sobran:
   
    «A recent issue of National Review carried an article by Elliot
   Abrams, Norman Podhoretz's son-in-law, blaming Christianity for
   anti-Semitism. This is the sort of propaganda Will Buckley [Sr] was
   afraid would be disseminated in America if Jewish power continued to
   expand ... Would Bill [Buckley, Jr] allow it into his pages if he wasn't
   afraid to oppose Jewish influence?
   
    "People have a way of praising what they fear, as everyone in Russia
   who dated to speak at all used to celebrate Stalin in the most fulsome
   terms ... [T]he praise itself was nothing but a barometer of inner dread
   ... In the future, I'm sure that the now-fashionable toadying to Jews
   will appear equally embarrassing"
   
    Todaying is perhaps the best word that can describe what Bill Buckley
   did when he went along with the «ex»-Trotskyite plan to purge Sobran,
   Buchanan, and their followings from political influence. As Sobran told
   Pravda:
   
    "We're dealing with cunning fanatics who are masters of propaganda.
   And with the most embarassing toadies."
   
    The men Buckley feared moved to oust Sobran in three stages -- one in
   the mid-1980s, one in the early 1990s, and one in 1993, when Sobran was
   dismissed. As Buckley put it in 1990:
   
    "Early in 1986 I scheduled a private dinner with [Sobran] at which I
   told him that I thought he should know that in his syndicated column he
   was gradually giving his readers the impression that he was obsessed on
   Israel."
   
    Sobran saw the meeting differently, writing in the Wanderer that:
   
    "Bill in effect warned me that Jewish power would try to wreck my
   career if I didn't shut up."
   
    And later in his syndicated column that:
   
    "[T]he friendship was strained in 1986 ... [H]e'd taken me to dinner to
   warn me of the dangers of being 'perceived' as they say, as an
   anti-Semite. ... [W]hen I told Bill about some Irish Catholic fans of
   mine ... he sneered 'you don't need those people.'"
   
    The dinner meeting was followed by a series of rushed editorial
   sessions. As Buckley put it:
   
    "I judged it to be crisis time. I called the senior staff of the
   National Review together. We met three times, twice with Joe."
   
    Or, as Sobran puts it:
   
    "In May the Zionist lobby went public in its smear against me,
   throwing the National Review into total panic. There was hysteria in
   Bill's apartment the night he and the other senior editors discussed
   it."
   
    What came from it was a public disavowal by Buckley of his own
   employee, in the magazine where Sobran was employed, without a prior
   warning to Sobran -- one of the worst forms of backstabbing and
   betrayal. Buckley wrote on July 4, 1986:
   
    "The structure of prevailing taboos respecting Israel and the Jews is
   welcome."
   
    Effectively endorsing Jewish censorship of his own paper.
   
    Sobran stayed on though -- was not fired -- yet. But in 1990, he
   managed to raise a stir again, this time opposing the Gulf War that
   George the First fought for Israel, pointing out that the accusations
   against Iraq were nothing but a Zionist fraud. As Sobran wrote in his
   column "Why National Review Is Wrong":
   
    "We're at that phase where the clever fellows have five-step victory
   plans. It doesn't occur to them to assume responsibility for dead and
   mutilated young men ...We've reached a point where our putative allies
   pose a greater threat to us than our supposed enemies. Saddam Hussein
   is our new Hitler of the month, so designated ..."
   
    Again the American Jewish lobby, which had been working hard for a
   declaration of war, went into a fervor. Buckley himself was terrified
   by the article -- Didn't Ol' Joe know there was a war on? As Buckley
   later admitted:
   
    "In September 1990, after reading two pieces by him which I judged
   indefensible, I resolved wearily and sadly to dismiss Joe from the
   board of senior editors of National Review. I wrote out a personal
   letter:
   
    "I read ... this morning ... the piece you submitted to National Review
   ('Why National Review Is Wrong').
   
    "I can only conclude you can't stay on as senior editor of National
   Review "
   
    The letter was never sent, and Sobran was never told of it until more
   than a year later, when the December 30, 1991 issue of National Review
   hit the newsstand. Reflecting back in his "How I Was Fired By Bill
   Buckley" column, Sobran wrote:
   
    "I felt a strange subterranean anger from Bill dating from about that
   time. ... I was saying things ... he didn't have the courage to say. ... He
   said he would fire me unless I retracted a column on the Gulf War he
   took as implying that he was in effect working for Israel. ... I told him
   to learn the difference between an employee and a serf."
   
    But the tension between Bill and Joe wouldn't ebb. It just grew worse.
   A Sobran writes in that same column:
   
    "In early 1990, as I recall, Bill told me he was writing an 'essay on
   anti-Semitism' and asked for my views on the subject. ... He neglected to
   tell me I was one of his targets, and he wanted my views for the
   purpose of quoting them against me."
   
    Bill was obsessed and breaking. As he later wrote in a rather
   disturbing use of the third person:
   
    "Podhoretz, et al, are terminally displeased with Sobran, but only
   disappointed with Buckley."
   
    Buckley didn't want Podhoretz to become "terminally displeased" with
   him as well. After all, they could cut off his television appearances
   and his invitations to cocktail parties -- and we know that there are
   few men who wouldn't sacrifice their courage and their manhood for the
   continued chance to be on the A-list at Jewish-conservative cocktail
   parties.
   
    In fear of the vanguardist neo-conservatives, Buckley would, in
   Sobran's words:
   
    "privately promise Norman that I would not be allowed to write
   editorials about the Middle East."
   
    He would also publish his infamous issue of National Review, "In
   Search Of Anti-Semitism" (Chapter I), which would draw more mail than
   National Review had seen in a long time -- a whole 200 letters. As
   Sobran told Pravda:
   
    "The 200 letters National Review received ... were overwhelmingly in
   my favor -- 7 to 1, by my rough count. They broke straight on
   Jew/Gentile lines. One of the biggest reader reactions the mag ever
   got, and not one of them were published! Amazing! What a hush-up."
   
    Buckley's rambling 43 page essay that prompted this mail is hard to
   quote because it doesn't say much of anything. As Sobran told Pravda:
   
    "Bill Buckley never called me anti-Semitic, in fact he denied that I
   was anti-Semitic, but he made a serpentine charge that I somehow
   deserved to be falsely accused of anti-Semitism!"
   
    And that sums it up. The essay is available in .pdf form in the
   National Review 's hard to find "archives" section on their website if
   any readers would like to follow up (try to search their website, and
   then when the search results screen comes up, you will be able to
   access the archives. Pay the $1.50 and type "anti-semitism" into the
   search engine, searching a time period that includes December 30,
   1990).
   
    Most notable about it was Bill Buckley's attack on his own father,
   denouncing his parent as an "anti-Semite" as well. As Sobran would
   comment:
   
    "I think it tells you something about Bill's real attitude towards
   Jews that he thinks the way to propitiate them is by offering up a
   member of your own family -- Isaac sacrificing Abraham, so to speak. ...
   Bill's own attitude [towards Jews] reminds me of the way Stalin was
   regarded: public fawning, private dread."
   
    In another essay, "Pervasive Fear," Sobran would write:
   
    "According to an old and now estranged friend of Bill [Sr] named
   Revilo Oliver, the elder William Buckley was 'well known in certain
   circles for his discreet subvention of effectively anti-Jewish
   periodicals and his drastic opinions about the alien's perversion of
   our national life. ... Others have described Bill [Jr.] as ... 'terrified
   of his father's anti-Semitism.'"
   
    Oliver is himself an interesting character, one who has pointed out
   that what happened to Joe Sobran and Pat Buchanan is similar to what
   happened to Lyndon LaRouche a few years earlier, stating in his essay
   "The Mystery of LaRouche" that:
   
    "LaRouche knew in 1977 what the [Israelis] were doing in their secret
   underground plant for manufacturing atomic and nuclear bombs. ... When
   the CIA could no longer ignore the information and photographs provided
   by the Jewish defector (who was quickly kidnapped by the Mossad ...), it
   protested that it never had the least suspicion of what the [Jews] were
   doing in Israel. ... When the FBI and Virginia authorities raided
   LaRouche's headquarters in October 1986 ... the FBI came into possession
   of .. positive proof of the treason that is normal in the Jews'
   hirelings."
   
    Good thing for Joe he didn't discover the secret Israeli nuclear
   weapons program. He only questioned if endorsing Israeli aggression in
   general was good for the United States.
   
    In 1993, after going public with his criticisms of Buckley and the
   fawning editorial attitude of the National Review 's staff, Joe Sobran
   was dismissed from his position and, in his words:
   
    "I found a great many markets quietly closed to me. ... I have found new
   markets for my services; but believe me [the Israeli Lobby] will do
   their best to ruin you if you suggest that Israel is anything but the
   best friend this country ever had."
   
    Where Are They Now?
   
    Having gone into much detail before about the National Review and the
   history of its current employees (see "White Zion"
   http://english.pravda.ru/main/2001/11/23/21825.html and "Police State
   Zionism And Its Discontents"
   (http://english.pravda.ru/main/2002/01/25/26004.html) There is no need
   to review that material again. As Gregory Pavlik, writing for the
   Rothbard-Rockwell report, put it in his essay "Neo-Conservatism is a
   CIA Front» (http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig/pavlik2.html):
   
    "[T]he National Review was conceived as a way to put the
   isolationist(s) our of business. ... It was the [National Review] that
   finally broke the back of the populist and isolationist right, the
   mass-based movement with its roots in the America First anti-war
   movement.
   
    "Neo-cons ... now insist on massive extensions of the warfare state.
   [They] demand ... war to topple the head of ... foreign government(s)
   unfriendly to Israel, while denouncing right-wing isolationism [and]
   libertarianism."
   
    This can be seen in what has happened with the men who led the charge
   against Joe Sobran.
   
    Norman Podhoretz, of course, is still the war-mongering imperialist
   swine he always was.
   
    David Frum is now writing the speeches that George the Second is using
   to take us into war.
   
    Alan Dershowitz is now, in the words of CBS, "tell[ing] Correspondent
   Mike Wallace that torture is inevitable."
   
    Richard Cohen is demanding that Oracle CEO Larry Ellis' plan for a
   national ID card be implemented
   
    And the whole crew of corrupt Israelites is still spewing into our
   society the garbage they were spewing a decade prior, only today there
   is even less criticism of them than the little that could still be
   heard in 1990. Joe Sobran advised us back then to:
   
    "[T]ake a quick inventory of the commentators who constantly defend
   Israel: Podhoretz, Rosenthal, Dershowitz, Martin Peretz, George Will,
   Mortimer Zuckerman, Morton Kondracke, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Kenneth
   Adelman, Amos Perlmutter, Eric Breindal, Cal Thomas, Max Lerner, Ben
   Wattenberg, Charles Krauthammer, William Safire, and Fred Barnes."
   
    Not only are those names still with us, but they are in power, having
   snuck in under the curtain of the Bush administration. An Israeli spy
   like Richard Perle, who in the 1970s was dismissed from government
   service for passing top secret data on to the Israeli embassy, now sits
   on the Defense Policy Review Board -- and was considered as a candidate
   for the post of Secretary of Defense! America is no longer concerned
   about Israeli infiltration of the government -- instead, the American
   government has become a colonial outpost of the Zionist terror-state!
   
   Conclusions
   
    "One cannot be against Israel or Zionism ... without being
   anti-Semitic. Israel is the state of the Jews. Zionism is the belief
   that Jews should have a state. To defame Israel is to defame the Jews.
   To wish it never existed, or would cease to exist, is to wish to
   destroy the Jews."
   
    So writes Hillel Halkin in the February 6th edition of the Wall Street
   Journal. But his point begs a question: Given that Israel is evil, an
   anti-Zionism is the only position a moral person can take, if it is
   right to defame Israel, can it still be wrong to defame Jews? At the
   very least, it is a lot easier to defame both of them together, than to
   have to hem and haw and clarify every criticism one makes. And to what
   group of people is the threat of being "anti-Semitic" so terrible,
   except to Jews? Jews see it as the ultimate insult, because it is a
   negation of who they are -- and Jews are always shocked to discover
   that few people outside their community judge others by or care how
   those others feel about Jews. A writer like Joe Sobran, used to being
   published in Jewish-owned or dominated media can have his career
   destroyed, but beyond those made specially vulnerable by their choice
   of position, the organized Jewish-Israeli community has little power.
   
    Vanguardism, and the subversion of mass movements, has been a problem
   that isolated groups on the left have been dealing with for decades.
   But the Republican Party, desperate to cast itself as a "big tent,"
   welcomed the vanguardists in with open arms and gave them senior
   positions in the belief that the «conservatism» the Trotskyists spewed
   had some basis in something other than their cynical desire to take
   power. The Republicans were wrong, and the same men that welcomed the
   Zionists in with open arms have now been enslaved by their guests just
   as the Palestinians have been enslaved in Israel.
   
    Non-Jewish Republicans are kept in line through an apartheid system
   that relegates to them certain roles -- certain communities -- that the
   neo-conservatives constantly reserve the right to "settle" in.
   Republicans who openly defy the Israeli order are forcefully expelled,
   and their jobs are bulldozed as if they were Palestinian homes. Refugee
   camps such as the Reform and Constitution Parties have formed on the
   fringes, providing fertile ground for the recruiting of discontents by
   even more radical groups. The Jewish bourgeoisie urges the violent
   suppression of those who would oppose them, demanding laws to torture,
   to execute without trial, and to destroy by any means possible the most
   radical of those who dare to rebel against their rule.
   
    We are seeing Israel-America enacting the same kind of racist
   government within our borders, this time by deception, not invasion, as
   it established in Palestine in 1948. We were tricked into letting these
   people in, and now they are pushing us out, and with us goes all of the
   principles that we founded the country on, and everything that we once
   thought America stands for. They take away our First Amendment with
   hate speech laws, take away the Second Amendment because it is part of
   "anti-government militias," take away the Fourth and Fifth Amendments
   in the "war on terrorism," take away the Eighth Amendment because
   "anything, even torture, is justified in dealing with 'terrorists,'"
   and the Ninth and Tenth Amendments have been a dead letter for decades.
   
    If these people are not stopped and expelled from office, there will
   be nothing left for the rest of us, our families and our children, to
   have and enjoy a decade or two hence. We will have ID badges limiting
   our access to their communities, we will be stopped at checkpoints and
   denied medical care, and we will be left with nothing but rocks to
   throw in their streets and explosive belts to detonate in their markets
   after they have taken away every other means of resistance from us.
   
    In the story of Joe Sobran and his purge from National Review we see a
   key element in the final stages of the consolidation of the Zionist
   stranglehold on the American media, as he, one of the last dissenters,
   and a former true believer, was forced out -- not because he had become
   a great threat, though his martyrdom has given him an air of greatness
   -- but because he dared to dissent at all."

[rmstock]

Neoconservatism: a CIA Front
by Gregory Pavlik
https://web.archive.org/web/20000817184842/http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig/pavlik2.html

  "Not long after the Central Intelligence Agency was founded in 1947, the
   American public and the world were subjected to an unprecedented level
   of propaganda in the service of U.S. foreign policy objectives in the
   Cold War. The propaganda offensive of the government centered around
   its obsession with securing the emerging U.S.-dominated world order in
   the wake of the Second World War. It was a time when Europe lay in
   ruins and when subservience to U.S. planners, in government and
   business, was the order of the day.
   
   Although it is now widely conceded that there was never any serious
   threat of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe, let alone of the United
   States, the menace of the Soviet Union was the pretext underlying
   discussion of foreign policy. To pay for the Cold War, Harry Truman set
   out, as Arthur Vandenberg advised, to "Scare the Hell out of the
   American people." A daunting task, considering the years of pro-Soviet
   accolades that had previously flowing from the executive branch.
   
   Nonetheless, the Soviet threat served as a useful chimera to keep the
   masses in line. What were the targets singled out for demonization in
   the Cold War propaganda campaign? One of the chief aims of the
   government was to discredit dangerously parochial attitudes about the
   desirability of peace. It was also thought necessary to inoculate the
   public, particularly in Europe, against the virus of "neutralism."
   
   Further, since the American government had successfully entrenched the
   military industrial complex as a permanent feature of American life,
   U.S. planners were eager to discredit the idea of "disarmament," which
   meant not only a rejection of the techniques of mass murder developed
   and perfected by the Allied powers in the Second World War, but also a
   return to the pre-war days when the union of government and business
   was more tenuous, government-connected profits were fleeting, and
   market discipline provided a check on consolidation.
   
   The degree to which the press participated as a partner in the rhetoric
   of the Cold War was no accident. Media penetration was a major facet of
   CIA activities in both the foreign and domestic context. At its peak,
   the CIA allocated 29 percent of its budget to "media and propaganda."
   The extent of its efforts are difficult to measure, but some
   information has slipped through the shroud of secrecy.
   
   One report notes that the media organizations funded by the CIA in
   Europe included: the West German News agency DENA (later the DPA), the
   writers association PEN in Paris, a number of French newspapers, the
   International Forum of Journalists, and Forum World Features. The
   London-based Forum World Features provided stories to "140 newspapers
   around the world, including about 30 in the United States, amongst
   which were the Washington Post and four other major dailies."
   
   The U.S. Senate's Church committee reported that the Post was aware
   that the service was "CIA-controlled." German media tycoon Axel
   Springer had received the then-substantial sum of more than $7 million
   from the Agency to build his press empire. His relationship with the
   CIA was reported to have extended through the 1970s. The New York Times
   reported that the CIA owned or subsidized more than 50 newspapers, news
   services, radio stations, and periodicals. The paper reported that at
   least another dozen were infiltrated by the CIA; more than 1,000 books
   either written directly or subsidized by the Agency were published
   during this period.
   
   The penetration of CIA propaganda into the American press was far more
   extensive than an occasional distorted report from Europe. By the early
   70s, it had been revealed that the head of the Hearst bureau in London
   was a CIA agent. Some suspicion was aroused among those editors not on
   the Company payroll, and inquiring minds among them wanted to know if
   CIA men were currently in their employ. Soon thereafter the Washington
   Star-News published a report claiming that some three dozen journalists
   were on the payroll of the Agency. One agent was identified in the
   story as a member of the Star-News' own staff. When the paper went
   belly up in 1981, the "journalist" in question went directly to work
   for the Reagan administration. Later, Jeremiah O'Leary joined the staff
   of the Washington Times.
   
   Though pressured, the CIA refused for some time to release information
   on its tentacles in the "free press." There's little wonder why. When
   George Bush assumed the role of CIA director, he agreed to a single
   paragraph summary of each of its journalists for the Church committee.
   When it submitted the last of its data, the CIA had provided
   information on more than 400 journalists. The final Church report was a
   disappointment having been audited by the CIA. A subsequent House
   investigation was suppressed, though a leak it was published in the
   Village Voice. The House report indicated that Reuters news service was
   frequently used for CIA disinformation, and that media manipulation may
   have been the "largest single category of covert action projects taken
   by the CIA." According to the watchdog group Public Information
   Resource, propaganda expenses in the 70s may have exceeded $285 million
   a year. This was more than "the combined budgets of Reuters, United
   Press International, and the Associated Press."
   
   By the late seventies, reports emerged that the publishing house Copley
   Press had for three decades served as a CIA front. Its subsidiary,
   Copley News Service, provided the CIA a mouthpiece in Latin America.
   Propaganda in Latin America was more or less constant, as the CIA
   influenced elections, organized the torture and murder of dissidents,
   including priests, and backed brutal, but pro-American patsies
   throughout the region.
   
   The efforts in manipulation of opinion in Latin America were reflected
   in similar campaigns at home. For instance: pro-contra public relations
   specialist Edgar Chamorro served as a conduit of disinformation from
   1982 to 1984, manipulating journalists and Congressmen at the behest of
   the CIA. though domestic propaganda is a violation of the law, it was a
   standard Agency tactic.
   
   The Carter administration, in an effort to soften public interest in
   the CIA's involvement with the press, issued an executive order touted
   in the media as a ban on the manipulation of the American media.
   Belatedly, as another PIR report notes, the Society of Professional
   Journalists had this to say—"An executive order during the Carter
   administration was thought to have banned the practice [of recruitment
   of journalists by the CIA]. After a Council on Foreign Relations task
   force recommended that the ban be reconsidered, it was revealed that a
   'loophole' existed allowing the CIA director or his deputy to grant a
   waiver." As a follow-up, the Reagan administration signed a law banning
   media disclosure of covert operations as a felony.
   
   If reporters were often led to compromise their integrity at the behest
   of the warfare state, it was an example set at the highest levels of
   power in the American media. Press ownership, already concentrated to a
   ludicrous degree, shared a cozy relationship with the CIA from its
   start. Those chummy with the Company included Time-Life magnate Henry
   Luce, former Post owner Philip Graham and assorted New York Times
   owners in the Sulzberger family. Top editors of the Post and Newsweek
   have also served as agents, while the Post's intelligence reporter was
   on the take from the CIA in the 60s. Katherine Graham, for decades
   owner of the Washington Post, had this to say to top CIA officials as
   the Berlin Wall was starting to crack. "There are some things the
   general public does not need to know and shouldn't. I believe democracy
   flourishes when the government can take legitimate steps to keep its
   secrets and when the press can decide whether to print what it knows."
   
   The conservative movement that culminated in the elevation of Ronald
   Reagan to the presidency was a product of those turbulent Cold War
   years, and perhaps more so a product of domestic intervention by the
   security state than many of its participants would care to admit. The
   armchair warriors in the neoconservative camp and the inveterate
   interventionists at National Review can both trace their roots straight
   back to the propaganda efforts of the CIA.
   
   After the Hitler-Stalin pact, the neoconservatives moved from cafeteria
   Leninists to apologists for the U.S. warfare state without missing a
   beat, as Justin Raimondo shows in his 1993 Reclaiming the American
   Right. The CIA' s role in establishing the influence of the neocons
   came out in the late 60s, though the revelations were obscured by the
   primary actors' denials of knowledge of the covert funding. The
   premiere organization of the anti-Stalinist left, the Congress for
   Cultural Freedom, provided a base of operations to launch a
   left-intellectual crusade against the Soviet Union. The revelation that
   the Congress was a CIA front destroyed the organization' s credibility,
   and it went belly up despite the best efforts of the Ford Foundation to
   keep it afloat. The Congress disappeared, but as Raimondo notes, "the
   core group later came to be known as the neoconservatives."
   
   The Congress for Cultural Freedom was perhaps the Agency's most
   ambitious attempt at control and influence of intellectual life
   throughout Europe and the world. Affiliates were established in
   America, Europe, Australia, Japan, Latin America, India, and Africa,
   although its appeal was limited in the Third World for obvious reasons.
   It combined concerts, conferences, and publishing efforts, promoting
   the State Department line on the Cold War. Magazines affiliated with
   the Congress included, among others, the China Quarterly, the New
   Leader and, of course, Encounter.
   
   The funding of the Congress and similar fronts was organized through
   dozens of charitable trusts and nonprofit foundations, some of which
   were invented by the CIA. The money was made available through
   seemingly legitimate means to the Congress, as well as to political
   parties (including the German Social Democrats), unions and labor
   organizations, journalists' unions, student groups, and any number of
   other organizations that could be counted on to support U.S. hegemony
   in Europe and the world.
   
   The most complete story of the CIA and the Congress for Cultural
   Freedom is found in Peter Coleman's apologetic book, The Liberal
   Conspiracy. Coleman, a former Australian barrister and editor of the
   Congress magazine, the Quadrant, lets slip quite a bit of revelatory
   information in his analysis of the Congress's activities and its
   relationship to the CIA. The common targets of Congress literature, as
   Coleman notes, are familiar: the literature was anti-Communist, social
   democratic, and anti-neutralist. Other aims promoted by the Congress
   were cataloged by William Blum: "a strong, well-armed, and united
   Western Europe, allied to the United States....support for the Common
   Market and NATO and...skepticism of disarmament [and] pacifism.
   Criticism of U.S. foreign policy took place within the framework of
   cold war assumptions; for example that a particular American
   intervention was not the most effective way of combating communism, not
   that there was anything wrong with intervention per se...." F.A. Hayek
   commented that the Congress' strategic agenda was "not to plan the
   future of freedom, but to write its obituary."
   
   Among those involved with the Congress were James Burnham, Irving
   Kristol, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Daniel Bell, Arthur Schlesinger, Lionel
   Trilling, and the self-described "life-long Menshevik" Sidney Hook.
   After World War Two, Kristol worked as the editor for the American
   Jewish Committee's Commentary magazine, then served as editor of
   Encounter from 1953 to 1958.
   
   The Congress was organized by Kristol's boss and CIA man Michael
   Josselson, who maintained a tight grip on the activities of the
   Congress as well as the content of its publications. According to
   Coleman, Josselson's criteria for his editors was simple: they had to
   be reliable on the State Department line. Later, Kristol was to deny he
   knew the organization was a front. This seems unlikely for several
   reasons. For one, Sidney Hook stated that "like almost everyone else,"
   he had heard that "the CIA was making some contribution to the
   financing of the Congress." More to the point, as Tom Braden, then head
   of the CIA's International Organizations division, wrote in a Saturday
   Evening Post article, a CIA agent always served as editor of Encounter.
   Today, Kristol is a kind of svengali in the modern conservative world.
   
   Neoconservative prominence and influence owes quite a bit to the covert
   activities of this government, something they forget only rarely, as
   with the case of neocon Richard Perle who was caught spying for one of
   our "reliable allies" while in the Reagan administration.
   
   While waging the CIA's battle, the neocons were not yet billing
   themselves as conservatives. But the National Review was another
   matter, a journal aimed specifically at the American right-wing. The
   official line holds that National Review was founded in an intellectual
   vacuum, and, for all intents and purposes, created conservatism in
   America. But events, as are most often the case, were not that simple.
   The idea for National Review originated with Willi Schlamm, a hard-line
   interventionist and feature editor with the Old Right Freeman. At odds
   with the isolationism of the right, Schlamm was well-known for his
   belligerence, having demanded that the United States go to war over
   Formosa.
   
   One person in a position to know more details about the founding of NR
   was the late classicist and right winger Revilo Oliver. Although late
   in life Oliver was associated most closely with extremist racialism, in
   the 50s, he was an influential member of the Buckley inner circle, a
   regular contributor to National Review and a member of Bill Buckley's
   wedding party. Later, he went on to serve as a founding board member of
   the John Birch Society, until his break with the Society's founder
   Robert Welch.
   
   In his autobiography, Oliver explains that the National Review was
   conceived as a way to put the isolationist Freeman out of business. A
   surreptitious deal was cut with one of the Freeman editors (presumably
   Schlamm) to turn the magazine over to Buckley; a last-ditch effort
   saved the magazine, and control was assumed by Leonard E. Read,
   president of the Foundation for Economic Education. Unfortunately, Read
   balked at "politics," i.e. analyzing and criticizing government
   actions, and the magazine quickly slipped into irrelevance.
   
   It's hard to blame the editors of the Freeman for failing to see
   Buckley's treachery coming. As late as 1954, Buckley was denouncing the
   U.S. military as incompatible with a free society. Soldiers emerging
   from the armed forces, Buckley argued, were brainwashed with
   militaristic platitudes. In his essay, Buckley proposed a debriefing
   regime for all military men "solely based on the great libertarian
   documents of our civilization" and study of the lives of the world's
   "great individualists." But, as they say, the times, they were a
   changin'.
   
   Buckley's decision to launch the National Review was a watershed event
   on the right by any measure. As Buckley's admiring social-democratic
   biographer John Judis notes, "Except for Chodorov, who was a Buckley
   family friend, none of the right-wing isolationists were included on
   National Review's masthead. While this point of view had been welcome
   in the Freeman, it would not be welcome, even as a dissenting view, in
   National Review."
   
   As Judis notes, Schlamm, who envisioned himself as the guiding light
   behind NR, was not even a conservative. He "had more in common with
   Dwight MacDonald or Daniel Bell than with Robert McCormick; Buckley was
   turning his back on much of the isolationist...Old Right that had
   applauded his earlier books and that his father had been politically
   close to."
   
   Buckley, by 1955, had already been in deep cover for the CIA. While
   there is some confusion as to the actual duration of Buckley's service
   as an agent, Judis notes that he served under E. Howard Hunt of
   Watergate fame in Mexico City in 1951. Buckley was directed to the CIA
   by Yale Professor Wilmoore Kendall, who passed Buckley along to James
   Burnham, then a consultant to the Office Of Policy Coordination, the
   CIA's covert-action wing.
   
   Buckley apparently had a knack for spying: before his stint with the
   Agency, he had served as an on-campus informant for the FBI, feeding
   God only knows what to Hoover's political police. In any case, it is
   known that Buckley continued to participate at least indirectly in CIA
   covert activities through the 60s.
   
   The founding circle of National Review was composed largely of former
   agents or men otherwise in the pay of the CIA, including Buckley,
   Kendall, and Burnham. Wall Street lawyer William Casey, rooted in OSS
   activities and later to be named director of the CIA, drew up the legal
   documents for the new magazine. (He also helped transfer Human Events
   from isolationist to interventionist hands.)
   
   NR required nearly half a million to get off the ground; the only
   substantial contribution known was from Will Buckley, Senior: $100,000.
   It's long been rumored that CIA black funds were used to start the
   magazine, but no hard evidence exists to establish it. It may also be
   relevant that the National Review was organized as a nonprofit venture,
   as covert funding was typically channeled through foundations.
   
   By the 70s, it was known that Buckley had been an agent. More
   imaginative right wingers accused Buckley of complicity in everything
   from the assassination of JFK to the Watergate break-in, undoubtedly
   owing to his relationship with the mysterious Hunt.
   
   But sober minds also believed that something was suspicious about the
   National Review. In a syndicated column, Gary Wills wondered, "Was
   National Review, with four ex-agents of the CIA on its staff, a CIA
   operation? If so, the CIA was stingy, and I doubt it-but even some on
   the editorial board raised the question. And the magazine supported
   Buckley's old CIA boss, Howard Hunt, and publicized a fund drive for
   him." In reply, Buckley denounced Wills for being a classicist. But
   others close to the founding circle of National Review nurtured similar
   suspicions. Libertarian "fusionist" Frank Meyer, for example, confided
   privately that he believed that the National Review was a CIA front.
   
   If it was, then it was the federal government that finally broke the
   back of the populist and isolationist right, the mass-based movement
   with its roots in the America First anti-war movement. What FDR tried
   and failed to do when he sought to shut down the Chicago Tribune, when
   his attorney general held mass sedition trials of his critics on the
   right, and when he orchestrated one of the worst smear campaigns in
   U.S. history against his conservative opponents, the CIA accomplished.
   That in itself ought to lead conservatives to oppose the existence of
   executive agencies engaged in covert operations.
   
   Today, the war-mongering right is self-sustaining. Money flows like
   milk and honey to neoconservative activists from the major conservative
   foundations. Irving's son Bill Kristol has his sugar daddy in the form
   of media tycoon and alien Rupert Murdoch. National Review is boring,
   but in no danger of going under financially.
   
   But the cozy relationship with the federal government is the same.
   Neocons Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan now insist on massive extensions
   of the warfare state. The Weekly Standard demands a ground war to
   topple the head of a foreign government unfriendly to Israel, while
   denouncing right-wing isolationism, libertarianism, and Murray Rothbard.
   
   This time, the right-wing War Hawks face a potentially insurmountable
   challenge. The pro-war propaganda directed at the domestic population
   is failing badly. It is ineffective for two principle reasons: mounting
   intellectual opposition to the warfare state and the return of
   grassroots isolationism. Both trends have come to the fore. And not
   only with the collapse of communism. Wide spread public disillusionment
   exists over the Gulf War of 1991. Sold to the public as a high tech
   "virtual" war, the consequences have been harder to hide than the
   execution of the attack. With over a million Iraqis dead, Hussein still
   in power,US soldiers apparently poisoned by their own government and a
   not so far fetched feeling that the public was duped into supporting an
   unjust slaughter, people are starting to regard the Gulf War as an
   outrage. And they are right.
   
   At the height of the Cold War, opposition to interventionism was
   largely isolated to the anti-war Left. While marshaling an impressive
   analytic literature on the evils of US imperialism, particularly in the
   context of Viet Nam, the Left was suspect for its support of socialism
   and its sometimes overt sympathies for totalitarian regimes. On the
   right, things were different. Except for a noble band of libertarians
   lead by Murray Rothbard, conservatives and many libertarians were front
   and center in support of the security state and its nefarious
   activities. Now, virtually the entire right is opposed to
   interventionism. Traditionalists and even nationalist right-wingers are
   generally opposed to foreign military actions. The dominant anti-war
   force on the right is the growing number of explicitly isolationist
   libertarians, who want no truck with the warfare state on principle.
   The Weekly Standard acknowledged as much and identified Murray Rothbard
   as the guiding spirit behind today's antistatist, antiwar movement. And
   the nonliberal left, lead by long time noninterventionists like Noam
   Chomsky, remains opposed to US global hegemony. The neocons and their
   corporate liberal cronies are the only spokesman for militarism.
   
   The grassroots are hated by the neocons for precisely that reason. The
   man on the street, the movement conservative, the Perot voter, the
   Libertarian Party man – they all want the troops brought home and the
   tyranny of the US empire brought to a halt. When the leaders of the
   empire try to talk down to normal people, they are jeered off the
   stage. The RRR position – no more war – is more and more the position
   of the American people. That's a strike for peace and a strike for
   liberty.
   
   Greg Pavlik is editor of Forgotten Lessons: Selected Essays by John T.
   Flynn. This article first appeared in 1997 in The Rothbard-Rockwell
   Report."

[yankeedoodle]

Great articles, Robert.