You Must be Likud! (Anti-Jewish rhetoric infects the West)

Discussing Iraq last month on Washington Journal, C-SPAN's live call-in program, two callers — one American and one British — telephoned to ask whether I was Jewish. I am and said so. Both suggested that Jews were responsible for sending American soldiers into harms way. This was ironic since I volunteered for duty in Iraq, and then lived outside the security parameters enjoyed by other Coalition employees. One questioned whether I was part of a secret cabal operating for other than American interests. At the suggestion that his question might be anti-Semitic, the caller insisted my religion was a valid subject for a segment dedicated to a discussion of the situation in Iraq.

Discourse has changed. While e-mails pointing out any grammatical errors are a staple of think-tank work, anti-Semitic hate mail is becoming more commonplace. "While you're touting the glories of War, it's noticable [sic] that you don't put your own neocon ass on the line. You just want young American to fight and die to 'secure the realm,' make the world safe for Israel. You'll be the buzzard...who licks up the blood on the carcasses later," said one e-mail. While I am often critical of aspects of the Coalition's policy implementation, I do try to keep perspective. On May 4, I spoke on CNN about what has been going right in Iraq. Despite the press coverage on Fallujah and Najaf, there have been a number of improvements over the past year. I returned home to an e-mail stating, "Caught your thoroughly disgusting Jewish perspective on what Iraqis are going through," its author stated. "I am sure there are plenty of bridges reserved for the likes of you," he said, referring to the mutilation of civilian contractors in Fallujah.

That racists, anti-Semites, and other hate-mongers substitute threats for discourse is not new, although a number of Jewish journalists and analysts remark on the increasing virulence of their hate mail. The trend may be national and spread across fields. Hate crime directed toward both Jews and Muslims has increased in recent years. According to Federal Bureau of Investigation, in 2002, the latest year for which statistics are available, there were 931 anti-Jewish hate crimes and 155 anti-Muslim attacks; neither is acceptable.

What is new, however, is the infection of mainstream discourse with anti-Semitic references. The Bush administration is perhaps the most diverse in American history. There are blacks, whites, Hispanics, and Asians. There are Christians, Jews, and Muslims. The White House does not trumpet its diversity because it based nominations on ability rather than skin color. But, rather than applaud its diversity, many self-described progressives seek to attack the administration by targeting its officials on the basis of color and sectarian belief.

Many commentators question the loyalty of Jews serving in the Bush administration. The grand old dame of the liberal and progressive community The Nation began the downward spiral in discourse in a lengthy article for the September 2, 2002 edition. The article traced a group of Jewish "neoconservative" intellectuals, some of whom have affiliation with or attended forums sponsored by the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs or the Center for Security Policy. The author did not interview the subjects whom he criticized but, as has become increasingly common, relied on anonymous sources, in this case "a veteran Pentagon analyst" and "a veteran intelligence officer."

The anonymous intelligence officer alleged that many Washington insiders had a secret agenda "hewing to the Likudnik and Pax Americana lines." That Jewish colleagues might advocate for the same no-nonsense approach to terrorism as their Catholic, Presbyterian, or Muslim colleagues is irrelevant to him. The article implied that Jews serve two masters while others do not.

Sources remain anonymous when they have something to hide, or when they do not have the courage to speak their convictions outright. The records of frequent anonymous intelligence and defense sources give cause to doubt. Former Defense Intelligence Agency analyst Patrick Lang, for example, has argued that Likud controls America. He told associates that Undersecretary of Policy Douglas Feith sought to make the Middle East safe for Jews by a process of "de-Arabization." Several journalists have relied on Lang as a source as did television networks that used him as an analyst. Most did not mention that, in the run-up to the war in Iraq, Lang was a registered agent of a foreign government.

Karen Kwiatkowski, a former Pentagon official, is another anonymous source who has used a cloak of anonymity to peddle falsehoods. Her writing betrays her bias and fringe ideology. She has claimed, for example, that there was a "neo-conservative coup" within the Pentagon and that officials strove to build a "greater Zion." Kwiatkowski has bragged that she was the anonymous source for exposes by The New Yorker's Seymour Hersh, Newsweek's Michael Isikoff, and for Knight-Ridder's Washington bureau. She claimed insight into events and offices in which she has no first-hand knowledge. Much of what Kwiatkowski told these publications was innuendo or outright fabrication.

By publishing an article based on anonymous sources, bizarre interpretation, and cherry-picked data, The Nation legitimized a conspiracy theory that powerful and high-ranking American Jews were somehow duping elected officials to pursue an Israel-first policy. Britain's left-wing Guardian broadsheet seized The Nation's allegations and expanded upon them. On September 3, 2002, Brian Whitaker, Middle East editor of the Guardian, wrote, "For the hawks, disorder and chaos sweeping through the region would not be an unfortunate side-effect of war with Iraq, but a sign that everything is going according to plan. In their eyes, Iraq is just the starting point...for remoulding the Middle East on Israeli-American lines." The Guardian later reported that the Iraq desk at the Pentagon bypassed the White House and instead forged ties to a secret unit "inside Ariel Sharon's office." This claim is fictitious. But, once in print, such allegations become laundered into legitimacy.

Louis Farrakhan subsequently adopted the theme. "All of the agenda of the neo-conservatives was to bring President Bush in line with Israel and use the power of the American military to destroy the real and perceived enemies of Israel," said Farrakhan on May 3, 2004. Pat Buchanan and Justin Raimondo have pursued the theme in the pages of The American Conservative.

Most disappointing has been the ease with which the questioning of Jewish officials' motivations has infiltrated some in the academic community. University of Michigan history professor Juan Cole has accused several Bush administration employees of having "strong ties to the Likud." In an April 16, 2004 Salon.com essay, Cole went further, alleging that Bush advisers were "mapping the Iraq conflict onto the Likud Party agenda in Palestine." A similar theme is common among academics participating in some specialist e-mail lists which maintain a non-attribution policy. In a recent essay in Survival entitled "The End of the Neo-Conservative Moment," Georgetown University professor G. John Ikenberry equated neoconservatism with fundamentalism, equating religious terminology with political belief.

The allegations of dual loyalty have become so legitimate that they have even crept into U.S. government interagency discourse, catalyzed by the shrillness of the policy debates between the Defense and State Departments. One recent State Department appointee to the National Security Council has described policy opponents as "the Israel Amen crowd" to her colleagues. In the run-up to the war, one State Department official telephoned several Iraqi Americans prior to a Jewish U.S. official's visit to Dearborn and urged them not to attend a forum. According to the Iraqi Americans, the State Department official accused the visiting official of "working for the Zionists." The Iraqi Americans were dumbfounded; they had fled Iraq to escape such baiting and had focused on policy instead of religion. This autumn, a Coalition Provisional Authority colleague suggested that my questions surrounding an Islamist effort to exclude Jews from Iraqi nationality during an early stage of the Iraqi Governing Council debate was the result of my own religious beliefs. He made no mention of similar questions raised by a Catholic colleague, or the fact that I pestered the Coalition hierarchy with regard to questions surrounding the rights of Iraq's Yezidi population and its Christian communities. Many U.S. soldiers have made the ultimate sacrifice for the sake of Iraqi liberty; to cut corners on religious freedom would be a betrayal of their sacrifice and Bush administration policy. It is a matter of principle, not religion.

The news is not all bad. Several scholars have addressed the creeping anti-Semitism in the current discourse. Max Boot, Olin Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, published an excellent essay in the January/February 2004 edition of Foreign Policy in which he called the charge "a malicious myth" the argument that neoconservatives were "Jews who serve the interests of Israel." Boot explained, "With varying degrees of delicacy, everyone from fringe U.S. presidential candidates Lyndon LaRouche and Patrick Buchanan to European news outlets such as the BBC and Le Monde have used neocon as a synonym for Jew, focusing on Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Eliot Cohen, and others with obvious Jewish names." Boot continued, "In the 1980s, they were the leading proponents of democratization in places as disparate as Nicaragua, Poland, and South Korea. In the 1990s, they were the most ardent champions of interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo-missions designed to rescue Muslims, not Jews. Today neocons agitate for democracy in China (even as Israel has sold arms to Beijing!) and against the abuse of Christians in Sudan. Their advocacy of democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan is entirely consistent with this long track record. If neocons were agents of Likud, they would have advocated an invasion not of Iraq or Afghanistan but of Iran, which Israel considers to be the biggest threat to its own security."

American Enterprise Institute scholar Joshua Muravchik has also lent historical perspective to the myth of Jewish dual loyalty, in his important article, "The Neoconservative Cabal," published in the September 2003 edition of Commentary. But scholarship in journals of the field, and recognition among the mainstream media are two very different things.

The irony from my own experience is that Judaism is far less an issue for Iraqis and Iranians than it is for some Americans. While I receive hate mail from Americans and British, many in the Middle East, be they Arabs, Kurds, or Persians tend to support anyone who stands up for their human rights. They embrace Jews and mock al-Jazeera Islamists who remained silent in the face of Saddam's terrorism. On January 14, 2004, Sallah Issa, editor of the Egyptian weekly Al-Qahira, wrote an essay critical of the dissemination of anti-Semitic ideas in Egypt. In a translation provided by the Middle East Media Research Institute, 'Issa wrote, "The problem is that these ideas cannot withstand any rational discussion.... It is not very smart to espouse the lies spread in the wave of persecution of the Jews in medieval Europe, when we — the Arabs and the Muslims — had no part in this...."

In 1996, I was living in Iran, studying Persian and working on my dissertation. I would sometimes visit a small historical center for assistance with documents and advice on navigating Tehran's labyrinthine bureaucracy. One day, an employee of the center came up to me and, after apologizing ahead of time for her question, asked whether I was Jewish. I confirmed I was. "Good," she said. "A friend from elementary school is Jewish. Do you want her to show you the synagogue?"

It is disturbing when the backlash to anti-Semitic discourse comes from an Egyptian newspaper rather than the pages of the Washington Post and the New York Times. It is likewise troubling when the "Are you Jewish?" question is far more malicious in the United States than it is (sometimes) in Iran. But, then again, times are changing.

2 posted on 05/19/2004 11:40:38 AM PDT by SJackson (Arab leaders don't give a damn whether the refugees live or die, R. Garroway, UNWRA director, 8/58)

Speaking about the UK, if The Guardian is Leftish and anti-Semitic, what to tell about The Independence, which serves the same purposes as The Morning Star did? The latter died when the KGB stopped funding it... so now The Independent is doing the same dirty job for the Leftist fringe.

What's more, their Middle East "expert" is Robert Fisk, a.k.a. Baghdad Bob! This guy recently has published an article (duly reprinted by NZ press) explaining that the Al-Ghraib prison incidents clearly show the hand of Mossad and are a result of activities (or the lack thereof) of the American officials "with dual loyalty". Ol' Bob didn't hesitate to directly call them Jews and pro-Israeli lobbyists...

E-mail sent to the author:
"While you're touting the glories of War, it's noticable [sic] that you don't put your own neocon ass on the line. You just want young American to fight and die to 'secure the realm,' make the world safe for Israel."

I'm seeing the word, "neocon" more each year with anti-Jewish rants. Some whole publications that would seem entirely reasonable at first are pushing the slow rot, very slowly revealing neo-NAZI speech. Readers of those publications will find out very slowly, eventually, what they are really about. One is a Serb publication in the USA.

Agreed. I hate the term "neocon" and it has many different meanings to different people. But many out there clearly use it to mean "Jew" or "blindly pro-Israel", plain and simple.

Got a question for Israel bashers. If asked, which nation would not hesitate to back the US in any way possible?
Why, Germany.
France.
Canada.
Mexico.
Russia.
China.
Uh...
Uh.....
Israel?
That's the ticket.

<Got a question for Israel bashers. If asked, which nation <would not hesitate to back the US in any way possible?
<Why, Germany.
<France.
<Canada.
<Mexico.
<Russia.
<China.
<Uh...
<Uh.....
<Israel?
<That's the ticket."

The premise of your question is wrong. You care about the safety, security of our great country, the U.S., but the radical left Israel bashers don't. They ally themselves with myopic pacifists, who would be thrilled that no country would back the U.S. in a war. Israel's willingness to back the U.S. would not give them pause to reflect, but would be felt a thorn in the side of these traitors.

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