Posted on 07/21/2006 5:53:01 AM PDT by SJackson
Since the outbreak of the Hezbollah-Israeli conflict, Pat Buchanan and other paleoconservatives have made themselves true exponents of populism: the Jew-baiting, conspiracy-driven demagoguery of 1890s agrarians.
In two columns, posted at WorldNetDaily this week, Buchanan accused President Bush of being a puppet of nefarious Jewish warmongers. Outlets of the Hate America Right – especially Paul Craig Roberts and LewRockwell.com – have joined him, and then some.
Nothing sets Buchanan’s imagination racing like a Bush-backed Israeli war. On Tuesday, Pat asked, “Who is whispering in his ear?” His answer: bloodthirsty Hebrews.
That Tel Aviv is maneuvering us to fight its wars is understandable. That Americans are ignorant of, or complicit in this, is deplorable.
This occurred after “Israel instructed the United States to terminate all aid to the Palestinian Authority,” and “Our Crawford cowboy meekly complied.” In an overtly ethnic reference, he added, “Bush sounded less like the leader of the Free World than some bellicose city councilman from Brooklyn Heights.”
In Thursday’s column, entitled “No, This is Not ‘Our War,’” Buchanan writes America is “impotent” because “we have allowed Israel to dictate to whom we may and may not talk.”
Worse, blood-drenched Jews are using America equipment to commit war crimes. “Israeli airstrikes [are] an outlawed form of collective punishment, that has left [Hezbollah supporters] with no sanitation, rotting food, impure water and days without light or electricity in the horrible heat of July.” (Days without light in July?)
He sagely concludes: “And we wonder why they hate us.”
So effusive was his most recent offering that Pat felt a need to add halfway down the article, “None of this is written in defense of Hamas, Hezbollah, or Iran.”
No, but it’s all designed to smear the Jews and paint the terrorists as the victims rather than the aggressors and sole instigators of this war. He accomplishes this by highlighting only Muslim suffering – which Israel has taken extraordinary lengths to avoid – while ignoring the daily panic that fills the heart of an average Israeli boarding a bus, attending a wedding, or lunching at a corner deli.
He does this by overlooking the fact that Hezbollah and other Muslim terrorist groups hide in residential neighborhoods to maximize the number of innocent civilians killed by IDF retaliation in the hopes the world media will highlight Israeli “brutality” – as Pat has so willingly obliged.
Buchanan keeps mum that Hezbollah terrorist are blocking Lebanese civilians from evacuating southern Lebanon, making members of this largely Christian nation human shields. Islamist terrorists targeted fellow Arabs and Muslims in Jordan, Turkey, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia – why would this surprise Pat?
Pat makes genocidal lunatics the moral superiors of Binyamin Netanyahu by claiming, for instance, that “there is no solid proof Iran is in violation of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which it has signed, but Israel refuses to sign.”
All of this is perpetrated with the single aim of making Israel an international pariah, his pastime for decades – one other paleocons share, few more than LewRockwell.com.
That paleocon paradise has become a hub of the Hate Israel, Hate America Right. On Wednesday, Butler Schaffer, a – what else? – professor at the Southwestern University School of Law, wrote, “Wars are intentionally put together by two or more states to enhance their power interests.” “the United States was a clear wrongdoer” in Vietnam and bewailed “the terrorism practiced upon the same people by the United States to reduce the Iraqi people to obedience.”
LR.com columnist Jim Lobe gave this deadly conspiracy a Jewish face, writing, “[T]he neo-cons have succeeded in aligning U.S. policy with the right-wing government in Israel, a key goal going back to the first Likud government of the late Menahim Begin.”
When Israel – finally – responded to years of terrorist provocations, LR columnist and professor Christopher Westley discovered the problem is the existence of Israel itself. “[T]he existence of a state overrides whatever mutually beneficial arrangements that might otherwise promote civilization” between Jews and Islamist murderers. He quickly notes, “To argue this has nothing to do with love or hate for Israel,” because “you can love Israel without equating it with the Israeli state.” Still, Israel “must know that governments cannot kill and dismember the innocent without creating blowback later. It also applies to the U.S., which funds Israel’s military.”
Chris Floyd, a columnist for the Moscow Times, posted a mock “Imperial Edict” allowing “our most steadfast and faithful satrap, Ehud Agrippa” to “continue his destruction of the Arab rabble.”
William S. Lind seems positively disposed to Hezbollah’s “brilliantly conducted raid” because, as a terrorist gang, its popularity is “pushing the Arab and larger Islamic worlds further away from the state.” And “One can only imagine how [shelling Israel] resonated world-wide with people who are often bombed but can never bomb back.”
Eric Margolis assessed the conflict as Israeli “revenge,” because Hezbollah was “the only Arab military force to ever defeat Israel.” More importantly, terrorist kidnappings were merely “a gesture to help the embattled Palestinians.”
All this appeared at the website that prominently featured of Lyndons Larouche associate Karen Kwiatkowski, published the columns of Cindy Sheehan, and rallied with leftists. (Pat Buchanan’s rag, The American Conservative, also published Kwiatkowski; not Sheehan, though.)
LewRockwell.com is also the home of former assistant secretary of the treasury and right-wing nutcase Paul Craig Roberts. In March, LR posted a piece by PCR insinuating a “’black opts’ [sic.] group will orchestrate [an] attack” on America “in order to gain a pretext for attacking Iran.” As recently as last month, he reaffirmed America had a secret plan to nuke Iran.
In response to Israeli defense, Roberts noted some neocons, “mostly Jew,” had been accused of “dual loyalties.” In fact, the kidnapping of the IDF soldiers was all a Jewish conspiracy. Shrewd Jews knew removing Saddam from power “would open the door for Israel to provoke attacks from Hizbollah.” Besides, “what is decried as ‘Arab terrorism against Israel’ is, in fact, the only tactic Muslims have for calling the world’s attention to the plight of the Palestinians.”
David Duke liked that article, just as he defended Cindy Sheehan. Holocaust deniers also linked to articles by Roberts (and Buchanan).
What more eloquent testimony can one hope for than seeing anti-Semites recognize their own?
Since the onset of the war, Roberts and LewRockwell.com have lashed out at “the crazed David Horowitz.” Thomas DiLorenzo reveals the original sin of the “(supposedly) former Commie”: he likes Abraham Lincoln.
The real sin David Horowitz commits is that he recognizes a moral distinction between terrorists who cross international borders to kidnap soldiers – in order to secure the release of convicted Muslim terrorists, including a child murderer – and a long-overdue response by a freedom-loving state aimed at ending the endless cycle of victimization negotiating with terrorists inevitably inspires.
Some of Lew Rockwell’s cohorts didn’t comprehend this during the Cold War, some did, including Buchanan and Roberts. None of them comprehend it when the principle is applied to the Jewish State, implying something else is clouding their reasoning.
Personally I wouldn’t characterize Horowitz or Frontpage as anti-Catholic based on that blog entry, but I admit I don’t consider Hillary an anti-semite either.
By the time he was openly embracing Lenora Fulani - a Marxist abortion maximalist - I was already long gone from his camp.
But it is depressing to see a man I once respected become so overcome with Jew-hatred and hatred of economic freedom.
It would be easy to call him crazy - yet his unhingement doesn't come from a chemical imbalance or a brain injury, but things which can effect anyone: self-importance and bitterness.
Learn something every day :>)
Doesn't get much national attention, but he's worth an occasional read.
Pat's not an anti-semite. He even had a relative who died at Auschwitz. He fell out of the guard tower.
A reasonable assessment - your reference to the Vatican being frustrated by its inability to exert geopolitical influence in favor of the Catholic communities in Israel, Lebanon and Syria is insightful.
I was also thinking about the internalization of Jerusalem under UN auspices. Obviously it will never happen, but the UN still holds on to the idea, that's the underlying reason nations moved their embassies out of Jerusalem. It's one of the prime reasons the Vatican delayed recognizing the State of Israel until the mid 90s. I'm sure the idea, and resentment, still rattles around some Vatican hallways.
What gets me is that he is still on TV and is seen as one of the main voices of the Right ....
Here is a guy who was in the Reagan White House, was considered for years to be the standard-bearer for the right wing of the Republican Party, and was considered by many to be a conservative's conservative.
Now that he's completely abandoned all his principles and deeply embraced the Left, he still insists that he is a conservative and the Left can show footage of him at the '92 convention, show footage of him working with Reagan and walking with Nixon, etc. to "prove" his assertion.
PJB is paraded by the MSM as an example of what the mainstream conservative movement in America represents. Never mind that he never received more than 1% of the popular vote. They do it to scare the so called moderates. Pat's ego prevents him from seeing that he's nothing more than a useful idiot to them.
Does he still drive a Mercedes while lecturing us about buying American?
While I certainly wouldn't place Jerry Pournelle amongst the Lew Rockwells, Justin Raimondos and Pat Buchanans of the world (I like and respect Pournelle), that is a strained analogy if I ever heard one.
I'm incredulous that Rockwell is publishing Cindy Sheehan stuff.
It's always my fault. I'm used to it. LOL
As much as I have admired Pat for years, he's just plain wrong on this.
From his public comments, I believe Pat Buchanan is an anti-Jewish bigot. I can't go into detail as it was a long time ago and I don't want to get sued, but I also have personal information from a trusted friend who knew him that greatly supports this view.
I wondered if I was the only one who thought this. There is a deep undercurrent of Anti-Americanism about them lately.
In the case of Pat I think he has held a grudge from being rejected as a GOP presidential nominee. Also he seems to be more enamored of the Plato model of government with a philosopher king (with himself as king of course) then of a government of for and by the people.
People change. Goldwater became a leftist on this late years, and Buchanan has come to despise our alliance with Israel
I am hoping he develops Altzheimers so that his thinking improves.
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