Smearing Buchanan
October 26, 1999
On Monday, October
25, Pat Buchanan
announced that he was (as expected) leaving the Republican Party to seek
the presidential nomination of the Reform Party. That same day, the
Wall Street Journal, with obvious malice aforethought,
devoted most of its editorial page to an extended character assassination
of Buchanan by the fanatical Zionist Norman Podhoretz, former editor of
Commentary magazine.
Podhoretz accused Buchanan of
anti-Semitism, a charge he has been flinging since 1990, when Buchanan
noted that Israel’s “amen corner” was calling for war
with Iraq, and he still cites that crack as evidence of Buchanan’s
bigotry. He doesn’t say whether Israel actually has an “amen
corner” in this country, probably because the answer is so obvious.
The Amen Corner, consisting of Zionists like Podhoretz himself,
passionately advocated war on Iraq, Israel’s enemy.
After the war it transpired that
Buchanan himself hadn’t known the full truth: the same Wall
Street Journal reported that the American Israel Public Affairs
Committee had been lobbying Congress behind the scenes to declare war on
Iraq. The Amen Corner had been busier than most of us had imagined.
Podhoretz offers no evidence that
Buchanan has ever treated Jews other than decently; he merely objects to
some of his opinions on Israel, World War II, and American foreign policy.
For Podhoretz, these add up to “anti-Semitism.”
But the word
“anti-Semitism” prejudices the whole discussion. In the long
history of friction between Jews and gentiles, it presumes that the fault
has always been on the side of the gentiles, who have distrusted Jews for
no reason. There is no similar word — “anti-gentilism”?
— for the corresponding attitude of Jews, as exemplified by
Podhoretz’s beloved state of Israel, where gentiles are legally
inferior to Jews. In a Jewish version of Jim Crow, for example, gentiles
are banned from residence on over 90 per cent of the land of Israel.
Needless to say, Buchanan doesn’t
demand residency restrictions on Jews in America. Neither, for that
matter, does David Duke. What is fundamental law in Israel would be
deemed illegal and downright indecent in this country.
But we are to understand that Jews are
always victims, even when they are persecuting others. Since Podhoretz
supports the discriminatory Israeli system, his charge of
“anti-Semitism” is hypocritical. For Israel he holds
principles directly contrary to those he espouses for America.
Podhoretz typefies a large number of
Jews in this country who validate what he calls “the old canard of
‘dual loyalty.’” Their loyalty is hardly even
“dual”: for them Israel always comes first, and they attack
U.S. presidents such as George H.W. Bush for refusing to sacrifice
American interests to Israel’s. Podhoretz edited
Commentary for many years, and he and his writers never
objected to any Israeli policy on grounds that while good for Israel, it
might be bad for the United States. You’d expect genuine
“dual” loyalty to favor the United States every now and
then.
For Commentary, as for the
rest of the Amen Corner, American interests are never a standard for
judging Israel; Israeli interests are the standard for judging America.
Since Jews are always victims, everything the Israelis do to others is
“self-defense.”
So in his own mind, warped as it is by
Zionist ideology, Podhoretz is smearing Buchanan in self-defense. If
everyone adopted Buchanan’s “America First” principle,
after all, American aid and favor to Israel might come to an end. Never
mind that such aid is unconstitutional and contrary to the warnings of the
Founding Fathers of this country. It’s telling that Podhoretz makes
no attempt to argue that support for Israel has been good for America.
Not content with voluntary American aid,
the Israelis have long practiced espionage and technology theft in this
country. The convicted spy Jonathan Pollard, serving a life sentence, is a
national hero in Israel, where a generous pension awaits him if he is ever
released from prison here — and Zionist groups are joining the
Israeli government in pressing for his early release.
The charge of “anti-
Semitism” is really a complaint that Pat Buchanan, unlike most
American politicians and journalists, is insufficiently subservient to
organized Jewish power. He has committed the sin of refusing to cower
and grovel. Far from being a hater, he is the target of the most obsessive
hate in America today — even in the “respectable”
press.
Joseph Sobran
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