Chalabigate
"Weapons of Mass Deception"
2003-03-12
Background/ The Iraq crisis as the War of the Jews
By Bradley Burston,
Haaretz Correspondent
07:58 12/03/2003
The Iraq crisis has triggered the largest pre-emptive anti-war movement in history, with millions on the march against a war that has still yet to begin. As the tide of opposition has grown, so has an undercurrent of argument that Jewish influence in America and Israel is a crucial factor pushing Washington into battle, in turn spurring furious debate over the line between free expression and classic anti-Semitism.
The latest focus of the debate was a congressional district close to Washington, where veteran Democratic Congressman James P. Moran Jr. sparked fiery condemnation by telling an anti-war gathering at a Virginia church why he believed mass opposition across the U.S. to an Iraq offensive had not done more to reverse the march to war."If it were not for the strong support of the Jewish community for this war with Iraq, we would not be doing this," Moran said in remarks quoted Tuesday by the Washington Post. "The leaders of the Jewish community are influential enough that they could change the direction of where this is going, and I think they should."An onslaught of criticism followed, undiminished by Moran's subsequent apology.
Voicing regret for replying as he did because his questioner had identified herself as Jewish, Moran maintained that his views pertained to organizations as a whole. "If more organizations in this country, including religious groups, were more outspoken against a war, then I do not think we would be pursuing war as an option." Sophie R. Hoffman, president of the Jewish Community Council of Greater Washington, was plainly unconvinced. "When Moran realized just how outrageous his remarks were, he attempted to backpedal, saying he didn't mean what he clearly said," she said. "This time, it just won't work."Hoffman's spokesman went further, calling Moran's statement "reprehensible and anti-Semitic."
Moran's remarks came amid a flood of commentary from analysts of both the American left and right suggesting that Bush administration was taking advice - if not outright orders - from the Sharon government and the Israeli defense establishment on handling Saddam Hussein.
The analysts' comments have intensified as top-ranking Israeli officials have gone on record predicting that the war could have a cure-all effect for many of the Jewish state's paralyzing economic and security ills. The image of such a deus ex machina has been invoked so often as to have entered Israeli public discourse as a synonym for the positive side effects of a war in Iraq - a solution which, if far-fetched in many of its assumptions, may be the only remedy on an otherwise desolate horizon. Of late, the very Jewish organizations speaking out against what they perceive as the new anti-Semitism have themselves come in for attack for allegedly doing the bidding of offstage Jewish and Israeli puppet-masters.
In October, the African-American poet Amiri Baraka - vowing to resist efforts to depose him as poet laureate of New Jersey for having written verses suggesting that Jews and the Israeli government had foreknowlege of the September 11 attacks - told a New York poetry club that he wanted to know "why the [B'nai Brith] Anti-Defamation League is not registered as an agent of a foreign power."
The initial rumblings of the current debate over alleged Jewish and Israeli influence took place years before the election of George W. Bush. The Clinton administration was peppered with Jewish aides in key positions.
But the debate has gone fully public only during the Bush presidency. Several of Bush's current defense advisers were instrumental in the preparation of a 1996 position paper for then-prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a darling of a number of self-described neo-conservatives, many of them high-profile Jewish Republicans. As one of its recommendations, the position paper advised Israeli leaders to "focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq."
The paper's authors included Douglas Feith, now Bush's Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, Richard Perle, currently chairman of the Pentagon's advisory Defense Policy Board, and David Wurmser, now a special assistant to Undersecretary of State John R. Bolton.
The voices alleging undue hardline Israeli and Jewish influence on the administration also cite the appointments of the hawkish Paul Wolfowitz as Deputy Defense Secretary and of Perle protege Elliot Abrams, viewed as a persuasive critic of the moribund Israeli-Palestinian peace process, as director of Mideast affairs for the National Security Council. The Abrams appointment spurred an unnamed senior administration official to tell the Washington Post last month that "the Likudniks are really in charge now." "The conspiracy theory appears in several variations, ranging from malignant to merely cynical," wrote New York Times columnist Bill Keller in a recent piece on contentions of undue Israeli and Jewish influence on American policy.
"But it goes something like this: A cadre of pro-Zionist zealots within the Bush administration and among its media chorus (the 'amen corner,' as the isolationist Pat Buchanan crudely called them last time we threatened Iraq) has long schemed to make the Middle East safer for Israel by uprooting the hostile regime of Saddam Hussein. They have finally succeeded, the theory goes, in pushing their agenda up to the desk of a gullible president."
Barely two weeks after September 11, Buchanan, a Nixon and Reagan White House aide and three-time presidential candidate, referred to the Netanyahu-neoconservative tie when he wrote, "The war Netanyahu and the neocons want, with the United States and Israel fighting all of the radical Islamic states, is the war bin Laden wants, the war his murderers hoped to ignite when they sent those airliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon."
After dealing with the Taliban in Afghanistan, Buchanan asks, "Do we then dynamite Powell's U.S.-Arab-Muslim coalition by using U.S. power to invade Iraq? Do we then reverse alliances and make Israel's war America's war?"
With Buchanan and other rightists implicitly questioning Jewish influence, similar arguments are being advanced by the American left. Although Jews on the left have long been inured to being dismissed - often by fellow Jews - as anti-Semitic for criticizing Israel, the vociferous nature of some anti-war organizers' anti-Israel positions has convinced even fellow Jewish leftists that anti-Semitism is indeed the proper designation. Rabbi and peace activist Michael Lerner, editor of the leftist-Jewish Tikkun Magazine, himself a frequent object of scorn by Jewish community officials incensed over his attacks on the Sharon government and his advocacy of Palestinian statehood, last month described speeches at anti-war rallies organized by radical left groups as, in part, "a barrage of Israel bashing and anti-Semitic garbage.""The emotional climate at these demonstrations has been one that most Jews I have encountered find somewhere between uncomfortable and overtly anti-Semitic," he told LA Weekly. "So it seems to me incredibly self-destructive for an anti-war movement - that at the moment does not have the allegiance of the majority of Americans - to be pushing away one of the most progressive sectors of American society, the liberal and progressive voices of Jews" who criticize Israel but actively support its right to exist.
Yet another source of tension is the timing of Israel's current request that the Bush White House approve billions of dollars in new loan guarantees and direct aid grants.
Responding to the burgeoning debate, Anti-Defamation League national director Abraham Foxman told the U.S. Jewish Forward weekly last month that while it is certainly legitimate to question where the Sharon government or American Jewish groups stands on the war, the thin line is crossed by those who portray these entities as a shadowy Jewish conspiracy that controls American foreign policy."It is an old canard that Jews control America and American foreign policy," Foxman said. "During both world wars, anti-Semites said that Jews manipulated America into war. So when you being to hear it again, there is good reason for us to be aware of it and sensitive to it."According to former minister of education and culture Amnon Rubinstein, the accusations that the imminent war "is a plot hatched by the Jews" ring familiar. "They are reminiscent of the Arab claim that the attack on the Twin Towers was perpetrated by Mossad ("It is a fact that that day, the Jews didn't come to work") or the blood libel that alleges the Jews are spreading AIDS in Egypt. "What makes these accusations so interesting is the fact that they link anti-Semitic propaganda with anti-Israeli propaganda," Rubinstein writes in Tuesday's Haaretz. "True, not every criticism of Israel is unfounded and not everyone who denounces raids on refugee camps in Gaza is anti-Semitic."However, Rubinstein continues, special attention should be paid the recent boycott of a Malaga, Spain art gallery against "any person related to Israel, as we are in total disaccord with its segregationist policy and we certainly hold an anti-Semitic attitude to any person related to that country." Although the Malaga case is extreme by any measure, Rubinstein cites it as a warning of the possible revival of classic Jew-hate – even in a secular society where the church has lost its influence. "The incident in Malaga shows that even where there are no Jews or very many committed Christians, there still remains a worrisome residue of that age-old hatred. Even when the Cheshire cat of the Church has vanished, its anti-Semitic smile remains - in Spain and elsewhere."
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=271599
This site may contain copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
Haaretz Correspondent
07:58 12/03/2003
The Iraq crisis has triggered the largest pre-emptive anti-war movement in history, with millions on the march against a war that has still yet to begin. As the tide of opposition has grown, so has an undercurrent of argument that Jewish influence in America and Israel is a crucial factor pushing Washington into battle, in turn spurring furious debate over the line between free expression and classic anti-Semitism.
The latest focus of the debate was a congressional district close to Washington, where veteran Democratic Congressman James P. Moran Jr. sparked fiery condemnation by telling an anti-war gathering at a Virginia church why he believed mass opposition across the U.S. to an Iraq offensive had not done more to reverse the march to war."If it were not for the strong support of the Jewish community for this war with Iraq, we would not be doing this," Moran said in remarks quoted Tuesday by the Washington Post. "The leaders of the Jewish community are influential enough that they could change the direction of where this is going, and I think they should."An onslaught of criticism followed, undiminished by Moran's subsequent apology.
Voicing regret for replying as he did because his questioner had identified herself as Jewish, Moran maintained that his views pertained to organizations as a whole. "If more organizations in this country, including religious groups, were more outspoken against a war, then I do not think we would be pursuing war as an option." Sophie R. Hoffman, president of the Jewish Community Council of Greater Washington, was plainly unconvinced. "When Moran realized just how outrageous his remarks were, he attempted to backpedal, saying he didn't mean what he clearly said," she said. "This time, it just won't work."Hoffman's spokesman went further, calling Moran's statement "reprehensible and anti-Semitic."
Moran's remarks came amid a flood of commentary from analysts of both the American left and right suggesting that Bush administration was taking advice - if not outright orders - from the Sharon government and the Israeli defense establishment on handling Saddam Hussein.
The analysts' comments have intensified as top-ranking Israeli officials have gone on record predicting that the war could have a cure-all effect for many of the Jewish state's paralyzing economic and security ills. The image of such a deus ex machina has been invoked so often as to have entered Israeli public discourse as a synonym for the positive side effects of a war in Iraq - a solution which, if far-fetched in many of its assumptions, may be the only remedy on an otherwise desolate horizon. Of late, the very Jewish organizations speaking out against what they perceive as the new anti-Semitism have themselves come in for attack for allegedly doing the bidding of offstage Jewish and Israeli puppet-masters.
In October, the African-American poet Amiri Baraka - vowing to resist efforts to depose him as poet laureate of New Jersey for having written verses suggesting that Jews and the Israeli government had foreknowlege of the September 11 attacks - told a New York poetry club that he wanted to know "why the [B'nai Brith] Anti-Defamation League is not registered as an agent of a foreign power."
The initial rumblings of the current debate over alleged Jewish and Israeli influence took place years before the election of George W. Bush. The Clinton administration was peppered with Jewish aides in key positions.
But the debate has gone fully public only during the Bush presidency. Several of Bush's current defense advisers were instrumental in the preparation of a 1996 position paper for then-prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a darling of a number of self-described neo-conservatives, many of them high-profile Jewish Republicans. As one of its recommendations, the position paper advised Israeli leaders to "focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq."
The paper's authors included Douglas Feith, now Bush's Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, Richard Perle, currently chairman of the Pentagon's advisory Defense Policy Board, and David Wurmser, now a special assistant to Undersecretary of State John R. Bolton.
The voices alleging undue hardline Israeli and Jewish influence on the administration also cite the appointments of the hawkish Paul Wolfowitz as Deputy Defense Secretary and of Perle protege Elliot Abrams, viewed as a persuasive critic of the moribund Israeli-Palestinian peace process, as director of Mideast affairs for the National Security Council. The Abrams appointment spurred an unnamed senior administration official to tell the Washington Post last month that "the Likudniks are really in charge now." "The conspiracy theory appears in several variations, ranging from malignant to merely cynical," wrote New York Times columnist Bill Keller in a recent piece on contentions of undue Israeli and Jewish influence on American policy.
"But it goes something like this: A cadre of pro-Zionist zealots within the Bush administration and among its media chorus (the 'amen corner,' as the isolationist Pat Buchanan crudely called them last time we threatened Iraq) has long schemed to make the Middle East safer for Israel by uprooting the hostile regime of Saddam Hussein. They have finally succeeded, the theory goes, in pushing their agenda up to the desk of a gullible president."
Barely two weeks after September 11, Buchanan, a Nixon and Reagan White House aide and three-time presidential candidate, referred to the Netanyahu-neoconservative tie when he wrote, "The war Netanyahu and the neocons want, with the United States and Israel fighting all of the radical Islamic states, is the war bin Laden wants, the war his murderers hoped to ignite when they sent those airliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon."
After dealing with the Taliban in Afghanistan, Buchanan asks, "Do we then dynamite Powell's U.S.-Arab-Muslim coalition by using U.S. power to invade Iraq? Do we then reverse alliances and make Israel's war America's war?"
With Buchanan and other rightists implicitly questioning Jewish influence, similar arguments are being advanced by the American left. Although Jews on the left have long been inured to being dismissed - often by fellow Jews - as anti-Semitic for criticizing Israel, the vociferous nature of some anti-war organizers' anti-Israel positions has convinced even fellow Jewish leftists that anti-Semitism is indeed the proper designation. Rabbi and peace activist Michael Lerner, editor of the leftist-Jewish Tikkun Magazine, himself a frequent object of scorn by Jewish community officials incensed over his attacks on the Sharon government and his advocacy of Palestinian statehood, last month described speeches at anti-war rallies organized by radical left groups as, in part, "a barrage of Israel bashing and anti-Semitic garbage.""The emotional climate at these demonstrations has been one that most Jews I have encountered find somewhere between uncomfortable and overtly anti-Semitic," he told LA Weekly. "So it seems to me incredibly self-destructive for an anti-war movement - that at the moment does not have the allegiance of the majority of Americans - to be pushing away one of the most progressive sectors of American society, the liberal and progressive voices of Jews" who criticize Israel but actively support its right to exist.
Yet another source of tension is the timing of Israel's current request that the Bush White House approve billions of dollars in new loan guarantees and direct aid grants.
Responding to the burgeoning debate, Anti-Defamation League national director Abraham Foxman told the U.S. Jewish Forward weekly last month that while it is certainly legitimate to question where the Sharon government or American Jewish groups stands on the war, the thin line is crossed by those who portray these entities as a shadowy Jewish conspiracy that controls American foreign policy."It is an old canard that Jews control America and American foreign policy," Foxman said. "During both world wars, anti-Semites said that Jews manipulated America into war. So when you being to hear it again, there is good reason for us to be aware of it and sensitive to it."According to former minister of education and culture Amnon Rubinstein, the accusations that the imminent war "is a plot hatched by the Jews" ring familiar. "They are reminiscent of the Arab claim that the attack on the Twin Towers was perpetrated by Mossad ("It is a fact that that day, the Jews didn't come to work") or the blood libel that alleges the Jews are spreading AIDS in Egypt. "What makes these accusations so interesting is the fact that they link anti-Semitic propaganda with anti-Israeli propaganda," Rubinstein writes in Tuesday's Haaretz. "True, not every criticism of Israel is unfounded and not everyone who denounces raids on refugee camps in Gaza is anti-Semitic."However, Rubinstein continues, special attention should be paid the recent boycott of a Malaga, Spain art gallery against "any person related to Israel, as we are in total disaccord with its segregationist policy and we certainly hold an anti-Semitic attitude to any person related to that country." Although the Malaga case is extreme by any measure, Rubinstein cites it as a warning of the possible revival of classic Jew-hate – even in a secular society where the church has lost its influence. "The incident in Malaga shows that even where there are no Jews or very many committed Christians, there still remains a worrisome residue of that age-old hatred. Even when the Cheshire cat of the Church has vanished, its anti-Semitic smile remains - in Spain and elsewhere."
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=271599
This site may contain copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
Milton Frihetsson, 16:18
