In the early 1930s, Walter Duranty of the
New York Times was in Moscow, covering Joe Stalin the way
Joe Stalin wanted to be covered. To maintain favor and access, he
expressly denied that there was famine in Ukraine even while millions
of Ukrainian Christians were being starved into submission. For his work
Duranty won the Pulitzer Prize for journalism.
To this day, the
Times remains the most magisterial and respectable of
American newspapers.
Now imagine that a
major newspaper had had a correspondent in Berlin during roughly the
same period who hobnobbed with Hitler, portrayed him in a flattering
light, and denied that Jews were being mistreated — thereby not
only concealing, but materially
assisting the regime’s persecution.
Would that paper’s respectability have been unimpaired several
decades later?
There you have an
epitome of what is lamely called “media bias.” The Western
supporters of Stalin haven’t just been excused; they have received
the halo of victimhood for the campaign, in what liberals call the
“McCarthy era,” to get them out of the government, the
education system, and respectable society itself.
Not only persecution of Jews
but any critical mention of Jewish power in the media and politics is roundly
condemned as “anti-Semitism.” But there isn’t even a
term of opprobrium for participation in the mass murders of Christians.
Liberals still don’t censure the Communist attempt to extirpate
Christianity from Soviet Russia and its empire, and for good reason
— liberals themselves, particularly Jewish liberals, are still trying
to uproot Christianity from America.
It’s permissible
to discuss the power of every other group, from the Black Muslims to the
Christian Right, but the much greater power of the Jewish Establishment
is off-limits. That, in fact, is the chief
measure of its power:
its ability to impose its own taboos while tearing down the taboos of others —
you might almost say its prerogative of offending. You can read articles in
Jewish-controlled publications from the
Times to
Commentary blaming
Christianity for the Holocaust or accusing Pope Pius XII of indifference to
it, but don’t look for articles in any major publication that wants to
stay in business examining the Jewish role in Communism and liberalism,
however temperately.
Power openly acquired,
openly exercised, and openly discussed is one thing. You may think
organized labor or the Social Security lobby abuses its power, but you
don’t jeopardize your career by saying so. But a kind of power that
forbids its own public mention, like the Holy Name in the Old Testament,
is another matter entirely.
There is an important
anomaly here. The word “Jewish,” in this context,
doesn’t include Orthodox or otherwise religious Jews. The Jews
who still maintain the Hebraic tradition of millennia are marginal, if they
are included at all, in the Jewish establishment that wields journalistic,
political, and cultural power. Morally and culturally, the Orthodox might be
classed as virtual Christians, much like the descendants of Christians who
still uphold the basic morality, if not the faith, of their ancestors. Many of
these Jews are friendly to Christians and eager to make common cause
against the moral decadence they see promoted by their apostate cousins.
Above all, the Orthodox understand, better than almost anyone else in
America today, the virtues — the
necessity — of tribalism,
patriarchal authority, the moral bonds of kinship.
The Jewish
establishment, it hardly needs saying, is predominantly secularist and
systematically anti-Christian. In fact, it is unified far more by its
hostility to Christianity than by its support of Israel, on which it is
somewhat divided. The more left-wing Jews are faintly critical of Israel,
though never questioning its “right to exist” — that is,
its right to exist on terms forbidden to any Christian country; that is, its
right to deny rights to non-Jews.
A state that treated Jews
as Israel treats gentiles would be condemned outright as Nazi-like. But Israel is
called “democratic,” even “pluralistic.”
Explicitly
“Jewish” organizations like the American Jewish Committee
and the Anti-Defamation League enforce a dual standard. What is
permitted to Israel is forbidden to America. This is not just thoughtless
inconsistency. These organizations consciously support one set of
principles here — equal rights for all, ethnic neutrality, separation
of church and state — and their
precise opposites in Israel, where
Jewish ancestry and religion enjoy privilege. They “pass” as
Jeffersonians when it serves their purpose, espousing rules that win the
assent of most Americans. At the same time, they are bent on sacrificing
the national interest of the United States to the interests of Israel, under
the pretense that both countries’ interests are identical. (There is,
of course, no countervailing American lobby in Israel.)
The single most
powerful Jewish lobbying group is the American Israel Public Affairs
Committee (AIPAC), which, as its former director Thomas Dine openly
boasted, controls Congress. At a time when even Medicare may face budget
cuts, aid to Israel remains untouchable. If the Israelis were to begin
“ethnic cleansing” against Arabs in Israel and the occupied
lands, it is inconceivable that any American political figure would demand
the kind of military strike now being urged against the Serbs in
ex-Yugoslavia.
Jewish-owned
publications like the
Wall Street Journal, The New Republic, The
Atlantic Monthly, U.S. News & World Report, the
New York
Post, and New York’s
Daily News emit
relentless pro-Israel propaganda; so do such pundits as William Safire,
A.M. Rosenthal, Charles Krauthammer, Jeane Kirkpatrick, and George Will,
to name a few.
That Israel’s journalistic
partisans include so many
gentiles — lapsed goyim, you might say — is one more sign of
the Jewish establishment’s power. So is the fact that
this fact
isn’t mentioned in public (though it is hardly unnoticed in private.)
So is the fear of being
called “anti-Semitic.” Nobody worries about being called
“anti-Italian” or “anti-French” or
“anti-Christian”; these aren’t words that launch avalanches of
vituperation and make people afraid to do business with you.
It’s pointless to
ask what “anti-Semitic”
means. It means trouble. It’s
an attack signal. The practical function of the word is not to define or
distinguish things, but to conflate them indiscriminately — to
equate the soberest criticism of Israel or Jewish power with the
murderous hatred of Jews. And it works. Oh, how it works.
When Joe McCarthy
accused people of being Communists, the charge was relatively precise.
You knew what he meant. The accusation could be falsified. In fact the
burden of proof was on the accuser: when McCarthy couldn’t make
his loose charges stick, he was ruined. (Of course, McCarthy was hated
less for his “loose” charges than for his accurate ones. His
real offense was
stigmatizing the Left.)
The opposite applies to
charges of “anti-Semitism.” The word has no precise
definition. An “anti-Semite” may or may not hate Jews. But
he is certainly hated
by Jews. There is no penalty for making the charge
loosely; the accused has no way of falsifying the charge, since it
isn’t defined.
A famous example. When
Abe Rosenthal accused Pat Buchanan of “anti-Semitism,”
everyone on both sides understood the ground rules. There was a chance
that Buchanan would be ruined, even if the charge was baseless. And there
was
no chance that Rosenthal would be ruined — even if the charge
was baseless.
Such are the rules. I violate them,
in a way, even by spelling
them out.
“Anti-
Semitism” is therefore less a charge than a curse, an imprecation
that must be uttered formulaically. Being a “bogus predicate,”
to use Gilbert Ryle’s phrase, it has no real content, no functional
equivalent in plain nouns and verbs. Its power comes from the knowledge
of its potential targets, the gentiles, that powerful people are willing to
back it up with material penalties.
In other words,
journalists are as afraid of Jewish power as politicians are. This means
that public discussion is cramped and warped by unspoken fear — a
fear journalists won’t acknowledge, because it embarrasses their
pretense of being fearless critics of power. When there are incentives to
accuse but no penalties for slander, the result is predictable.
What is true of
“anti-Semitism” is also true to a lesser degree of other
bogus predicates like “racism,” “sexism,” and
“homophobia.” Other minorities have seen and adopted the
successful model of the Jewish establishment. And so our public tongue
has become not only Jewish-oriented but more generally
minority-oriented in its inhibitions.
The illusion that we
enjoy free speech has been fostered by the breaking of Christian taboos,
which has become not only safe but profitable. To violate minority taboos
is “offensive” and “insensitive”; to violate
Christian taboos — many of them shared by religious Jews — is
to be “daring” and “irreverent.”
(“Irreverence,” of course, has become
good.)
Jewry, like Gaul, may be
divided into three parts, each defined by its borders vis-à-vis the gentile
world. There are the Orthodox, who not only insist on borders but wear
them. They often dress in attire that sets them apart; they are even
willing to look outlandish to gentiles in order to affirm their identity and
their distinctive way of life. At the other extreme are Jews who have no
borders, who may (or may not) assimilate and intermarry, whose politics
may range from left to right, but who in any case accept the same set of
rules for everyone. I respect both types.
But the third type
presents problems. These are the Jews who maintain their borders
furtively and deal disingenuously with gentiles. Raymond Chandler once
observed of them that they want to be Jews among themselves but resent
being seen as Jews by gentiles. They want to pursue their own distinct
interests while pretending that they have no such interests, using the
charge of “anti-Semitism” as sword and shield. As Chandler
put it, they are like a man who refuses to give his real name and address
but insists on being invited to all the best parties. Unfortunately,
it’s this third type that wields most of the power and skews the
rules for gentiles. The columnist Richard Cohen cites an old maxim:
“Dress British, think Yiddish.”
Americans ought to be
free to discuss Jewish power and Jewish interests frankly, without being
accused of denying the rights of Jews. That should go without saying. The
truth is both otherwise and unmentionable.
Joseph Sobran
